Ranger Black
by darkwinggirl
Summary: Dillon was Venjix all along. A long, dark take on the original planned ending of the RPM series.


**Author's note: **

There were RPM episodes titled Ranger Red, Ranger Yellow, Ranger Blue, and Ranger Green, but never Ranger Black. That's because the original series showrunner was fired before he could implement his plan, which was to have the last episode be titled Ranger Black. That episode would have revealed the truth about Dillon: that he was a Venjix puppet the whole time, a long con, and he was the heart of Venjix's ultimate plan to infiltrate and destroy Corinth. Tenaya was going to turn out to not be his sister at all, but only a red herring; Dillon's entire backstory would have turned out to be a fabrication. The series would end with the Rangers having to kill Dillon.

We'll never know how dark that planned plotline would have been to watch, but it certainly wouldn't have been as dark as this.

This work has no relationship to my previous Dillon/Ziggy works; the dynamic between the two is completely different this time around.

Trigger warnings for everything.

* * *

Dillon - no, it's not Dillon, it's _not_, but Ziggy still can't think of him by any other name - has Ziggy by the back of the head, and he pushes, practically dangling him over the pit, letting him get a good look inside.

"This is what your friend D-44 saw before he died," says Dillon. "And Tenaya. She went in twice. The first time, it pulled one of her arms off. And both her legs. She was conscious during the process. I replaced sixty-seven percent of her, and she still came out with an attitude. Strong girl. It was almost a shame to toss her in again."

Tenaya 15, with upgraded headgear, but missing her usual lipstick, watches from a corner. Her skin is dead and gray. Ziggy fervently wishes she would quip, whine, even threaten him the way she used to, but nothing's left there. She's just metal wrapped in a thin layer of flesh.

It might be easier if Dillon were the same way. Venjix, wearing Dillon's face, seems _too_ full of life.

There's certainly nothing robotic about the way he's enjoying Ziggy's fear. One hand fists Ziggy's shirt and belt; the other tangles in his hair, and Dillon pushes, pushes, pushes further, until Ziggy lies at a forty-five degree angle over the pit, staring straight down. Only his toes are behind the metal edge. He can feel Dillon's breath - he's panting. Not tired: excited.

Inside the pit is a roiling engine made of teeth, claws, and wheels. It's what Ziggy imagines the inside of a giant wood chipper would look like. He can't believe that either Tenaya or Dillon survived five seconds in there.

He's frightened, of course. Although he's a good ten feet above the highest of the gnashing blades, his necklaces and shirtfront are dangling, and he instinctively wants to grab at them, tuck them away lest they somehow snag on the machinery and suck him in, one screaming inch at a time.

But the fear's grip on him is shallow. It's not what it should be. He's able to control it - to not scream or cower or beg the way he knows he would if it were Tenaya or anyone else suspending him over a hideous death machine. He just holds himself as still has he can, trembling only a little, and waits.

Somehow he knows he's not going to die today.

The monster inside Dillon won't make it that simple.

"What do you think, Zig?" asks Dillon. "All at once? Or should I send you back to Doctor K a piece at a time?"

Banter. Ziggy can do that.

"Counter-proposal!" he squeaks. "I mean, third option. Negotiation. Whatever. You send me back in _one_ piece, alive, and I'll see if she can repair the Fury. She'd do that for me. I made her smile once. Huh? Whaddaya say? You like the car more than you hate me, right? And the car is useful!"

Dillon's fingers twist painfully in Ziggy's hair. The Fury was destroyed in Dillon's..._Venjix's_ escape from Corinth.

"Honestly," Ziggy continues, unable to stop himself, "I'm upset about it too. I get that Scott was trying to stop you, but he could have considered the fact that I was in the passenger seat when he slammed his Zord right into us. I could have been killed! His own teammate! When I get back, he and I are going to have a conversation that - "

"Ziggy," says Dillon. "You're not getting back."

He tilts Ziggy even further. Ziggy's toes lift off the edge. Dillon's grip on his clothing is all that's keeping him aloft.

Although heat is rising from the whirling engine, Ziggy begins shivering uncontrollably.

"Best part?" says Dillon. "Even if you did escape - hell, even if I let you go right now and you walked back up to the dome without a scratch on you - they'd never take you back."

"That's not true," whispers Ziggy.

"Always the optimist."

"What, why? Because I left with you? They saw what happened. They know I didn't have a choice. You used me as a human shield. You pulled me in the car."

"You didn't even resist."

"Like I was supposed to fight you? Unmorphed? I think we know that would have been embarrassing for everybody."

"Everything about you is embarrassing, Ziggy."

Dillon yanks him back and places him on his feet, right at the edge. He stands half a centimeter behind Ziggy, looming, with his hands hovering over Ziggy's shoulders, letting Ziggy feel how close he still is to being pushed into that hideous mouth in the floor.

Ziggy continues trembling as Dillon whispers in his ear: "It's embarrassing that you can't fight. That you're worthless to the team. That they won't even miss you because without me, you're just a liability. That you're too stupid to figure out they'll never trust anyone who's lived outside the dome again. And…"

He jams his fingers into Ziggy's back, making him jump and yelp - and then cringe in shame, because it was only another threat.

"It's embarrassing that you'd have come with me even if I hadn't grabbed you. I should have just asked. Everybody would have understood. They all know about your little crush. They think it's adorable. They laugh about it behind your back."

Ziggy curls his hands into fists. A stupid, useless gesture.

"D-44 knew," Dillon sneers. "He didn't want to say anything. He was embarrassed for you."

Then he ruffles Ziggy's hair and steps away.

By the time Ziggy has control of his body again, and turns to look for him, he's gone.

* * *

The fortress is inescapable. Ziggy spends days wandering all the empty corridors, looking for doors, seams, anything that would indicate which direction _outside_ is, but the place is huge and it's not made for human navigation. There are no windows or signs; Ziggy can't even determine the time of day. The portals he does find might lead anywhere: trash compactors, factories, servers, other parts of the facility. Not that it matters. Ziggy can't budge any of them.

He's slightly hurt that Dillon doesn't even bother to imprison him in a cell. Couldn't he show some nervousness about Ziggy possibly destroying control panels or yanking out cords? Even breaking monitors? There are monitors around that Ziggy could break. Buttons he could push, switches he could flip.

He tries a few times.

The switches and buttons do nothing. Tenaya 15, who sometimes shadows him, says in her new monotone voice, "You're on camera. Anything you touch, he can just shut off the power to. Or ignore the signal. He controls every electrical impulse in the building."

As for property destruction, Tenaya or a pack of Grinders always appear to stop Ziggy. He does manage to accidentally put his hand through a glass panel, but only hurts himself, and the panel is quickly replaced.

He ends up taking Tenaya's old room, since she doesn't sleep anymore. It's the only one available, and thank God for it, because it has a sink, a shower, and a functioning toilet.

"Are we, like, sharing a bathroom now?" he asks, vaguely picturing his and Tenaya's toothbrushes sticking out of a plastic holder like he and his long-dead brother used to use.

"I no longer need one," says Tenaya. "But hygienic supplies are available for you. There are enough to last a lifetime."

"Ah. I see. Thank you. Slightly related topic, do you eat?"

"No."

"Um. Well, okay, sorry if this is a sensitive subject, but… when you were Tenaya 7, not 15, _did _you eat? Because I'm not cyborgified yet, and honestly, while your hospitality has been not as bad as I anticipated-"

"The wall unit can generate protein bars," says Tenaya. "Three a day should keep someone your size alive."

Ziggy spends an hour figuring out the wall unit. Eventually it excretes a small, moist, brown block in a process so visually appalling it _has_ to be intentional.

"Does it taste as good as it looks?" he asks Tenaya.

"Yes," she says.

He glances over with interest - is her sense of humor returning? There's nothing in her face that gives him a clue. Her lids, as always, are at half-mast, and she's not really looking at him.

It turns out that the protein bar is bearable. Not good, but Ziggy can get it down. So that's it: Immediate needs, survival, check.

Now Ziggy has to figure out what to do.

And why he's here. For better or worse, Dillon hasn't sought him out again.

Ziggy has no way to measure the passage of time, but after five sleeps - surely less than five days - his fear and depression dissolve into absolute fucking stir-craziness.

Tenaya is hopeless as company. She will answer direct questions sometimes, but Ziggy can't have a conversation with her. That doesn't stop him from trying, obviously. He blabbers away at her endlessly, first questions, then grand speeches, then stream-of-consciousness rambling. It isn't long before she knows his entire life story, from the cutting of the cord to the friend he caught lice from in kindergarten to his disastrous experience with a corsage at sophomore prom.

She, in turn, gives him almost nothing. She won't even tell him what the walls he stares at are made of, or how many days have passed, or what ingredients are in the protein bars. "Any information of that nature could someday be used against Venjix," she says.

Ziggy doesn't see how.

Tenaya does give him one actual, detailed response to a personal question, and it isn't until a few hours later that Ziggy figures out Venjix must have allowed it simply because it would be hurtful.

The question is, "Do you remember anything about what Dillon was like when you were kids?"

Her response: "D-44 and I were _not _brother and sister. That memory, like all D-44's memories, was manufactured by Venjix. He thought it useful to create a connection to me, potentially as a way to lure the Rangers out of the dome, or otherwise bring them close to me and trust me. It was also useful for D-44 to have a sympathetic backstory. The body I inhabit had no siblings. Neither did D-44. We did not even meet outside the dome."

Ziggy rails, internally and externally, against this information. He doesn't know if he believes it. It could just be intended to depress him; then again, it might be true. He will never have any way of knowing if any part of Dillon - personality, story, or body - was real, and not a Venjix trick.

When Ziggy crawls out of his room a few hours later and asks if Tenaya wants to see a shadow puppet show, she doesn't answer. He puts one on for her. She doesn't react.

Ziggy knows he has no defenses against his own desperate need for companionship. Among his thousand weaknesses, it is his biggest. It was what got him drawn into the cartels: He needs people. Anyone, absolutely fucking _anyone_ who will have him.

He can't be alone. There's no point in pretending he can.

So he goes looking for Dillon.

* * *

It's both a relief and a knife in the heart when Dillon greets him warmly, coming as close to a smile as he ever does.

"Ziggy! Was just wondering when you'd come around."

Somehow, in the week they've been apart, Dillon has come to look _more_ like his old self, not less. The moment he'd turned into Venjix, Ziggy had been able to tell the difference in his posture, his motions, his speech.

Now, perhaps because he's in his home territory, Venjix-as-Dillon has apparently relaxed into the body's old habits.

He's actually on the floor, working on some piece of machinery with a wrench, just like Dillon used to work on the Fury. That strikes Ziggy as odd. More than odd. Wrong. Doesn't Venjix use Grinders and the factory to do his dirty work?

He rises with Dillon's characteristic masculine grace, dusts off his jeans (he hasn't even changed out of Dillon's clothes!), hooks a thumb in his belt loop, and looks Ziggy up and down.

"Lonely?" he asks. "You look like shit. Tenaya's no Summer, huh. I already regret fucking up her personality." He bangs his wrench against the machine. "Wanna help? Hold the lug nuts while Dad changes the tire?"

Though he'd entered the chamber overflowing with words and thoughts, Ziggy is so shocked he briefly, like the Grinders do from time to time, overloads, draws a blank, and has to reboot himself.

Where the hell is Venjix? He only met the bot a couple of times, but this sure isn't how he talks. Or moves. Or acts. Not even close.

"You...curse now?" he asks. Like that's the important change.

"I guess." Dillon shrugs, just the way he used to. "Don't read too much into it, Zig. It's just the operating system. Came with the body. I can replace it anytime I want, but for now, it's working for me. Kind of a nice change. Slower pace, cooler speech pattern, little more relaxed. Why, you want the old Darth Vader voice back?"

Ziggy shakes his head vigorously.

"Well, come on, I'm on a schedule."

Dillon returns to the floor, and Ziggy, mystified, crouches beside him. Dillon hands him three sets of nuts and washers, removes a fourth, and opens a panel to reveal a glistening tiny city of circuits and microchips. He reaches in his pocket, pulls out a small metal flashlight, and hands it to Ziggy, saying, "Hold it still for me, kiddo."

Ziggy complies. He winces as one of Dillon's fingertips opens like the cap of a lighter, revealing a small laser which quickly starts to burn new paths into the circuit board with geometric precision.

His discomfiture keeps him quiet for only about a minute, and then he bursts out, "Why did you bring me here? Why are you keeping me? What's going to happen to me? Whatever it is, can it happen soon, please, because I'm going nuts!"

"Um," says Dillon. "Bunch of potential ideas. It'll depend on your friends. Come on, man, hold that thing still."

"Potential ideas like what?"

"Well, if this war goes on another year or so without me luring them out here again, I'll fill you up with hardware and send you in. Just when they've gotten used to the idea of you being dead. You'll reappear all zombified like Tenaya, shake them up. Mess with their heads. Then they'd have to fight you, maybe kill you. Hold here."

Ziggy holds a wire in place while Dillon fuses it and continues.

"If they come out here to attack me, or to save you, you'll be a great hostage. They'll find you in some torture machine, out of your mind, suffering. Hell of a distraction. Maybe a bargaining chip, though I don't think even Scott's dumb enough to actually trade one of the useful Rangers for you. I could lead them to you with a trail of small body parts… Okay, let go."

Dillon replaces the panel and motions for Ziggy to hand him back the nuts and washers.

"There's… god. I've got lots of ideas how to fuck with them. K'll probably contact me soon, and I like the idea of you having to speak to her for me. Like, I'll tell you what to say using a screen, but she'll have to Facetime with you instead of me, so she's always reminded of what she's lost and how she's failed. Your sad little face delivering my death threats. I could kill you sometime while she watches as a way to show I'm serious. Or if this war goes on forever, I could torture you long-term, starve you or something - not that they'd notice, you're so damn skinny - drive you insane, maybe send you back when you're a worthless, hollowed-out husk they get to feel guilty about. Or tomorrow I could fill you with a bomb and send you running into their open arms. I don't know, man. I grabbed you in a hurry, didn't think it through. Now I want to be sure to use you right, you know?"

"Sure," says Ziggy. "Absolutely. I get that. Thank you, honesty is always healthy!"

Once again, he isn't as frightened as he should be. He's...unsettled. The monologue strikes him as both insincere and desperate.

The person he's talking to isn't Dillon, though it looks and sounds like him. It isn't Venjix, though it is evil. It's not even a proper mix of the two. Neither of them was indecisive or wordy. What is going on here?

Ziggy realizes it's like watching a bad actor. He doesn't buy the character, but can't tell exactly where the flaw in the performance lies.

Well. He apparently has lots of time to look the gift horse in the mouth. And it's nice that, whoever this new character is, he resembles Dillon in so many ways.

"Wipe that look off your face," says Dillon. "You're creeping me out."

He gives the machine one good pound with his fist, and above it, a screen springs to life.

Ziggy, caught off guard, nearly bursts into tears of joy.

It shows the Rangers. Summer, Scott, Flynn, Gem, Gemma, fighting away, some with Grinders, some with an oil-can themed attack bot. They're all whole. Strong. Fast. Fighting well.

"There it is," says Dillon. "Our own little home entertainment system."

"Is this live?"

"Yep. Don't get proud when they beat that thing, it was just a way to test this system. Definitely didn't put a lot of work into it. You like?"

"I love it," breathes Ziggy. For more reasons than one. He can see that it's daytime. He can see Corinth. He can know…

He can't really know what's going on. Couldn't this all be manufactured for him? Computer generated?

Surely he's not worth all that work. Surely it's real.

"Stick around, Ziggy," says Dillon. "Maybe I'll install a popcorn maker for you."

* * *

Despite all Dillon's talk of planning to kill or torture Ziggy, the only problems Ziggy experiences for a couple of weeks are boredom and loneliness. He begins to suspect his true purpose in the fortress is simply to provide Dillon with an audience.

Dillon, who still talks far more than he used to, explains his attack bots to Ziggy, sometimes with theatrical menace but sometimes with the businesslike matter-of-factness of a secretary. His enthusiasm for his own plans waxes and wanes unpredictably.

All three of them - Dillon, Ziggy, and Tenaya 15 - watch the fights on the viewscreen. Even if Ziggy's asleep, Dillon calls Ziggy over and insists he stay for the duration. He says it's important for Ziggy to watch.

Ziggy knows he's a great audience. He can't stop commenting, gasping, throwing sympathy punches, wincing, asking questions. He wishes he could. Dillon always looks smugly satisfied at his antics. It doesn't seem appropriate to provide Dillon with the attention he so obviously craves, but there's no turning off Ziggy's personality, or suppressing his insatiable need for conversation.

Dillon does _not_ provide a popcorn maker. In time, however, he does get Ziggy a chair. Sometimes he uses it himself while Ziggy sits on the floor like a toddler, engrossed in the action.

The Rangers always win. Dillon doesn't get particularly upset about it; he doesn't even seem to mind when Ziggy leaps to his feet, pumping his fists in the air at the end of a battle and shouting something triumphant in Dillon's face. Dillon just tells him to calm down. Or to shut the fuck up before he gets himself electrocuted.

The incompetence of the attack bots doesn't stop Ziggy's suspense from engulfing him; as time goes on, his anxiety is getting worse. He has nothing to distract him from his worries about the future. Every battle, every punch thrown, is agony to him. He feels like his heart is going to give out one of these days.

If any of the Rangers die… if Corinth falls… won't it be his fault? Dillon used him as a human shield in the escape. Flynn had a shot; he didn't take it, hesitating over the possibility of hitting Ziggy.

And Ziggy hadn't helped. Hadn't struggled.

Dillon was right. In a way, he had been glad to be taken. He didn't want to leave his friend alone. He'd somehow thought he could save Dillon, that their bond was strong enough to break Venjix's programming.

For his part, Dillon grows (in Ziggy's opinion) stranger.

He disappears for long periods of time. When he's back, he keeps Ziggy around, even when he can't help out, which is always. He insults Ziggy, sometimes lightly ("Get your bony ass off the floor and look at this"), sometimes cuttingly ("Isn't it sad how the Rangers never ask Tenaya about you?"). Then he calls him "buddy" or other affectionate nicknames.

None of it feels real. It's all dreamlike, pointless, senseless.

As his days go, however, today is a good one. Dillon's inexplicable behavior takes a decidedly positive turn.

While Ziggy flails in suspense at the sight of an attack bot (railroad themed) bearing down on Summer, whose ankle is caught in a metal contraption, Dillon taps him on the shoulder.

"Here," he says. "You're killing me. Try some stress relief."

He hands Ziggy a lollipop.

Ziggy is so starved of sugar, he's got the damn thing in his mouth and half-sucked away before he even registers that he should have given a reaction - a thank you, a question, an expression of shock, something. He looks up at Dillon, who's leaning over the back of the chair, visibly amused. He, too, is sucking on some kind of candy. He shifts, and at his feet, Ziggy hears a familiar rustling sound.

There's a plastic grocery bag there. It's filled with sweets.

Dillon laughs outright as Ziggy dives into it headfirst without asking for permission, whooping for joy.

"Easy. You'll make yourself sick."

"Like you care," Ziggy says, not too sharply, around a mouthful of peanut butter cups. He's as happy in this moment as he's ever been. Then he cries, "Summer!" and whips back to the screen.

Summer's fine. She's free - it must have been thanks to Gem and Gemma, since there's rubble everywhere - and the bot is going down.

"Begin the download," says Dillon flatly.

Tenaya plugs something in. The walls light up in a way that's becoming familiar to Ziggy. The bot grows, and the Rangers call their Zords.

"Wait," says Ziggy. "Did you _buy_ this candy?"

"Nah. Halloween's coming up. Some lady bought it and Tenaya saw her and grabbed the bag from her on the way out of the dome."

"But you told her to."

"Well, yeah. She's pretty much just a camera on legs now, it's not like she's taking initiative."

"Did you do it for me? Don't steal for me! That's wrong! But also, thank you thank you thank you."

"Relax," says Dillon. "This body wanted sugar, that's all. I don't need it, but thought I'd give it a try, since D-44 liked it so much." He's sucking on a ring pop now. "D-44 was right. God damn. No wonder you people cling to life so hard."

"It's great, right? Oh, and you've got to try cupcakes. They're my favorite. White cake, white frosting. Predictable, possibly racist, I know, do NOT tell Scott I said it, but that's just the best. Have you had pizza? French fries? Oreos?"

"Isn't all that shit bad for you? 'Junk food', right?"

"Like it matters for either of us! I'm going to die soon anyway, and you're going to recycle that body in a month or two."

Ziggy deflates a little after realizing what he said.

"Christ," says Dillon, and then he adds his new favorite line to Ziggy, which he uses three or four times a day: "Wipe that look off your face. I just got you a present, can you relax and enjoy it for three seconds?"

"Yes, I absolutely can. Yes yes yes," says Ziggy. There might be more candy in the future if he's grateful enough.

The attack bot explodes in a shower of sparks. Ziggy, full of sugar and surprise and relief, flings his arms around Dillon, crying, "Did you see that? Amazing. Beautiful."

The hug feels really good. Dillon's just the right combination of warm, soft, and pliant. Ziggy mashes his face into his shirt front.

It's a few seconds before Ziggy realizes he's not being hugged back, and that Dillon's staring down at him, frowning.

"Sorry."

"You sure are, champ. Eat up."

Dillon dumps out half the candy bag on the ground, then takes the rest out of the chamber, heading for parts unknown.

Ziggy does end up making himself sick, really, barfing-his-guts-out sick, on the candy. He doesn't regret it.

But it doesn't relieve his stress.

He falls asleep feeling gross. Sticky and hollow...and wishing he could hug Dillon again. Or Tenaya, or Dr. K., or Scott, or anyone. He wants to be hugged back.

He's so fucking lonely.

* * *

It gets worse.

More weeks pass. A month.

Dillon isn't around for a lot of it. He disappears for days at a time, then only sees Ziggy for a couple of hours, then disappears again. Sometimes Tenaya goes with him.

Ziggy starts having crying fits. Panic attacks.

It's not like Corinth was even his home for that long. A year and a half, and he spent a lot of that time moving around, living in different houses, on different couches, with different groups of people. He was only with the Rangers a few months. There's no real reason he should be so utterly, devastatingly _homesick_ for them.

His stomach hurts constantly. A dull ache at first, then real pain, like there's a ball of lava rolling around in there, burning away no matter what position he lies in. He no longer has any appetite. Once in a while, when he brushes his teeth and spits, it's blood instead of saliva.

He feels like if he could only talk to someone, tell someone for just a few minutes and have them listen and understand, that it would get better. If the load could be passed to someone else long enough for him to straighten up and catch his breath - just for a second, a _moment_ of relief - maybe he could start thinking straight again.

But Dillon doesn't want to hear it. He curls up his lip if Ziggy drags himself in looking sick. Won't let him stay if he cries.

The real Dillon, Ziggy's Dillon, hadn't been like that, in spite of his tough-guy shtick. Yeah, he wasn't exactly the sympathetic type, and he hadn't been about hugs or kind words, but once in a while, when Ziggy was down, he'd lay a hand on Ziggy's shoulder. Or do something nice for him - foot the bill, carry something, get Scott to lay off. Ziggy knew he noticed and cared.

And of course all Ziggy wants to talk _about_ is Dillon. How he's changed, but not in any way that can be dealt with. Maybe if he were purely evil, purely Venjix, Ziggy could learn to hate him and work against him. Maybe if he put on a show for Ziggy and pretended to be his old self again, then Ziggy could either fight the delusion or embrace it.

This in-between state, where his friend is sometimes friendly, but not in the right way, the old way, and often evil, but not to the degree Venjix should be, is keeping Ziggy in a miserable, confusing limbo that is quickly morphing into its own special hell.

God, he misses Dillon. The best friend he ever had. His protector, his savior.

And, yeah, maybe more. Maybe somebody who he sometimes hoped… What? What had he hoped? Nothing serious. Nothing he'd admit.

He also misses magic. Games. TV. Ranger training. Stories. Everything. He begins staggering around the fortress like a zombie, looking for _anything_ to do - a mess to clean up, a piece of metal he can throw in the air, a broken Grinder he can kick.

There's nothing.

He finds a way.

He breaks his toothbrush nearly in half at an angle, leaving himself a nice little plastic shiv. It's not for stabbing. What good would that do him?

But one of the tile floors, he discovered while dragging his feet one day, has a veneer that scratches easily.

Ziggy begins to scratch into it.

He draws pictures like a child with sidewalk chalk. All the Rangers in their uniforms, holding their helmets. Even Dillon. Dr. K, frowning at them all and shaking a finger. Ziggy smiles as her face begins to appear. She's so pretty.

He draws their cars and their Zords, and the garage. Corinth. Pictures from his past. Nothing from the cartels, he doesn't like to think about that time. But his old family, his biological one. Pets he used to have. Magic tricks he'd like to perform.

The mural grows. His toothbrush half gets short and dull. He uses up the good half of his toothbrush, too, then convinces the wall unit to dispense him a new one.

He starts writing. Not sentences, just words in pretty, thick fonts, like graffiti. His own name. The names of his friends. Things he misses. Then he starts drawing again, all the stuff from his daily life he dreams of seeing again: smoothies and sandwiches and pizzas, cards, hats, smiles. When he gets near the edges of the room, he just starts drawing designs. Spirals and checkerboards. Swirls.

He's been working for hours, and has long ago removed his jacket in the heat of his labor. At some point, he sits up to breathe, but his hand keeps moving spasmodically, and he watches it, fascinated, as it brings itself to the crook of his left elbow.

He scratches himself there. Just a little, then deeper. He draws blood. It doesn't hurt. It kind of feels great, like he's scratching an itch, letting out hot poison. So he does the same thing on the other side.

Then the pain in his stomach blossoms and blazes.

_I'm going to die here_, he thinks, and he thinks of Dillon toeing his body with contempt, and that makes him start to cry.

As he cries himself unconscious, he vaguely hopes someone - maybe Tenaya, but maybe _Dillon_ \- will find him and take pity on him, carry him to bed, comfort him when he wakes.

But he wakes where he fell.

He's used up the whole floor on his art. Black and white and a few brown spots of blood. Though he's miserably dehydrated, it takes him a long time to work up the energy to drag himself to the sink for water.

When he gets out, Dillon's sitting on his bed.

All Ziggy feels at the sight is tired.

"You're a drama queen, Zig," says Dillon.

Ziggy executes a dramatic bow.

"In case you haven't figured it out," continues Dillon, "I'm not trying to kill you yet. If you need something, next time, ask."

He holds out an arm, indicating a small desk that wasn't there before. On the desk are a sketchpad and colored pencils. And two decks of cards.

"I know I'm going to regret opening my mouth," says Ziggy.

"But you're going to do it anyway, so."

"So. If memory serves, and at this point it honestly might not, I _did_ ask. I've asked for lots of things. I ask for stuff all the time."

Dillon stares at him, expressionless as Tenaya.

"Let me try again," says Ziggy. "All this is great, thank you, I'm keeping it, I'll use it. But I'm sick. Could I please see my friends? Humans can't be alone forever, Dillon."

"Keep calling me that. It really helps your case."

"We die in solitary confinement."

"Enjoy your toys. When the wall unit tells you, meet me in the command chamber."

Ziggy plays solitaire, then practices his card tricks. His hands feel thick and numb.

Later, in the command chamber, he watches the viewscreen as something that looks rather like the Fury breaks Scott's arm, cranking the elbow all the way in the wrong direction before it's taken down.

He memorizes Dillon's pose in that moment. The curve of his back, the set of his shoulders, the tension in his lips.

That night, he sketches Dillon from memory. It comes out pretty well.

* * *

"Ranger Operator Series Green?"

He's dreaming. Has to be.

"Ranger Operator Series Green? Please respond. Indicate current species and affiliation."

Ziggy opens his eyes. He's in his mural room, where he often goes to draw. He's fallen asleep sitting cross-legged, slumped over his sketchbook. In front of him, looking for all the world like a fairy-tale illustration with her black bob and white cloak, is Dr. K. She's staring at him as if he's a bomb that might go off.

He barks out a noise, definitely not the most dignified one he's ever made, and runs at her, arms wide.

And, of course, he goes right through her.

A hologram. She's always a hologram.

She turns to him, still with that wary, disbelieving expression.

"K!" he manages. He grins so hard his chapped lips split. "Dr. K! Oh, wow! It's so good to see you. You don't know, you don't know how good it is. It's me! Hello! Ziggy Grover. Is my name. Still hanging in here, just chilling, ready for...anything you need, or if a rescue was in the works, that would be good too. Is Scott okay?"

Scott's voice answers, though Ziggy can't see where it's coming from: "Holy shit."

Then Summer: "What? What's going on?"

Gem: "Doctor, is that…?

Gemma: "Ziggy?!"

Flynn: "What? You found him?!"

Summer: "Oh my god."

Flynn: "Oh my god."

The "Oh my gods" aren't in the happy tone Ziggy might have imagined if he'd pictured this scene in his head. He's figured out what's going on with the voices, based on a few past experiences with K's hologram system: Dr. K is projecting only her own image, but the others are in the room, and they're coming in over her microphone. He can't see them, but they can see him as a hologram in the Garage. It's like a two-person phone call for images, but all sounds in both rooms can make it through.

"Series Green, you have not responded to my questions."

"Doc, don't. Don't talk to him like that." Scott's voice. "Can't you see he's…"

"He can look any way Venjix wants him to look. Ranger! Species and affiliation!"

Ziggy stares into her pretty green eyes for a while, then remembers how conversations work. "I...don't… Did we do codewords? Or is this like a Harry Potter question? I'm a Hufflepuff. They're badgers?"

"It's him," says Summer.

"Jesus," says Flynn. "Jesus."

Gem and Gemma together: "What HAPPENED to him?"

"Series Operators, please contain yourselves," says Dr. K. "He can hear you."

Ziggy doesn't like this. Well, he likes the fact that he can speak to his friends right now more than he likes breathing and having eyes, but what they're saying and the way they're saying it…

"Ziggy, can you hear me?" asks Scott.

Ziggy nods. "Oh captain my captain! Did they fix your arm?"

"My arm? Don't worry about it. We're worried about YOU. How bad is it? Where are you hurt?"

What are they seeing? What's wrong with him?

He can't remember the last time he saw his own reflection.

He looks down at himself, at the clothes he hasn't thought about in a while. They're in bad shape. He's been washing them by just getting in the shower fully clothed every few days, then standing in front of a heating duct for the half-hour or so it takes them to dry. It's not the best system. And his shoes are wrecks. And his hair is long. He must look pretty homeless to them.

"I'm fine!" he cries much more loudly than is appropriate. Though all he's wanted for forever is to whine into a sympathetic ear, he suddenly can't stand the thought of them thinking he's spent all this time being actually tortured or something. "I'm completely okay, don't look at me like that, don't keep saying 'oh my god,' it's just the clothes. He hasn't hurt me."

"You're holding your stomach."

Yes, Ziggy is. Unconsciously. It's become a habit when he's upright, just keeping one hand there, clutching the spot where the stinging ache is the worst.

"Um," says Ziggy.

"When's the last time you ate?" Scott presses.

"It's kind of hard to tell time in here. I do eat, though. When I'm hungry."

One of the women, he can't tell if it's Summer or Gemma, is crying in the background.

He looks at Dr. K. Her face has softened. "I have no way of knowing if I'm speaking to my Ranger Operator or a hybrid impostor," she says. "But if that's you, Series Green-"

And she's gone. The voices are gone.

Ziggy stares at the spot K stood for a long time, though his senses are so scrambled, he doesn't know if it's seconds, minutes, or an hour.

Something inside him shifts and cracks, and he feels as if light is shining through the broken lines.

It's a good feeling. Freeing.

It's the sensation of hope.

They _are_ looking for him. They do care.

One way or another, he's not going to be here forever.

It's only been...what? How long has it been? Three months? Four? He can't tell. But say it's another six months, or a year, before they free him. So what? A year-long prison sentence? How many times has he heart the cartel boys brag "I could do a year standing on my head"?

He realizes a huge source of his despair was the thought that he was going to be imprisoned in this fortress until he died.

Well, he still might be. Dillon might kill him if his friends get too close to finding him. But that won't be decades from now. And it definitely won't be never.

He sinks back to the floor, smiling, still holding his stomach.

"Nice work, Ziggy," says Dillon from behind him. Dillon sidles up and sits down next to him like they're preschool buddies. He gives Ziggy a friendly chuck on the arm.

"You let her connection through on purpose," says Ziggy without looking at him.

"They've been trying for months. I've talked to K a few times. She keeps asking for proof you're alive. I didn't want to look like I was caving, but she hasn't been cooperating, so this time when she called, I bounced her signal to your bio signs. She'll think it was an accident, a glitch in the software."

"No she won't."

"...yeah, she probably won't. Doesn't matter. They know you're here now. I bounced her signal back to me and we negotiated. Not for your release, don't get your hopes up. But you look so fucking pathetic. They gave me what I want just see you gain a few pounds."

Ziggy finds himself distinctly uninclined to ask what Dr. K traded for his health.

"You made me think they weren't looking for me. That they didn't want me back."

"Hi," says Dillon. "Have we met? I'm the guy who murdered ninety percent of the people on Earth. Should I apologize for poking you in the self-esteem?"

"I have no idea what's real anymore."

"Sure," says Dillon. "_Anymore_. Says the guy whose best friend never existed."

"Ha. Since I turned out to be so useful, could I ask a favor, Dillon?"

"Shoot."

"Could I see a mirror?"

Dillon's face goes blank and he bites his lip; he's thinking. His uncharacteristic indecisiveness hasn't worn off. But after a few seconds, he rises and drags Ziggy up by the shoulders. He leads Ziggy, who can no longer really walk, but only shamble, to a corridor Ziggy can't tell from any of the others. There, he pulls off a piece of plastic siding to reveal a long metal sheet that's nearly as good as a real full-length mirror.

Ziggy takes a deep breath and looks.

Welp.

Somehow he had expected that there would be something _on_ himself, like growing hardware or sores or wounds he wasn't aware of; it isn't like it would be beyond Dillon to infect or hurt him without his knowledge. But that's not it, that's not what horrified his friends.

Ziggy is _clearly_ dying.

He's ghoulishly, skeletally thin. He's always been underweight, an ectomorph waiting to grow into his height. Now… He knew he'd lost weight in the fortress, but he was thinking it was in the area of five or ten pounds. How much can that ghost in the mirror weigh? Ninety cents, a buck tops?

The weight loss has aged his face dramatically. His lips are all but gone; really, they're just chapped, bleeding rims for the pinched hole of his mouth, and they're ringed with deep marionette lines.

Dark triangles are sunken under his cheeks; his eyes and temples are pits. There's a white patch in his wild mane of hair.

His skin is greyer than Tenaya's, and it's shiny with sweat he can't feel.

The whites of his eyes are yellow. And his eyeballs look somehow deflated - mushy, like there isn't enough liquid inside to keep them as firm and round as they should be.

His fingernails are long and chipped. His clothes are in such bad shape he suddenly wants to strip and burn them where he stands. He does abandon his shoes and socks right there in the hallway; they've had hard lives and need to admit defeat.

As he pulls the shoes off, he can see encroaching death in the weird, unfocused movement of his forearms. As a young child, he had been brought to visit an uncle dying of AIDS; this is just the way his uncle's arms moved in the hospital bed - floppily, with long, vague motions, as if they were controlled by puppet strings rather than internal muscles.

In the mirror, he finds Dillon's eyeline. Dillon's mouth is working like he's trying to think of something clever to say, or maybe he's grinding his teeth. He doesn't look happy. Good. He shouldn't.

Ziggy wants to say something deep and cutting, something that reveals his pain and forces Dillon to respond, but all that comes out is, "You know who I look like? Billy Butcherson! Like, I should do a cosplay!"

After a full two seconds of blinking, Dillon says, "Billy who?"

"The zombie from Hocus Pocus."

"Is that a movie?"

"Is that a movie!" Ziggy moans and grins and turns away from his haunting reflection. Dillon's much easier to look at. "You… how… it's only the greatest Halloween movie of all time! We've got to have a movie night, Dillon. You and me. Can't you quit with the killing the human race for a night? You haven't seen any of the classics."

"D-44 watched Star Wars with you."

"And you're a better man for it! But seriously! It might help you understand humans better. We'll do a holiday theme. Hocus Pocus. A Christmas Story. Nightmare Before Christmas! Come on. My dying wish."

"You're not going to die, Ziggy."

"I'd like to call your attention to the track record of humans in your care - "

"I scanned you. It's all fixable. You have a cluster of stomach ulcers and a heart murmur and a serious case of dehydration and anemia. I can cure all of those here in an hour. And…"

From somewhere - was he carrying it this whole time? - Dillon produces a squashed sandwich in a ziploc bag. Ziggy can see ham and dark green lettuce; his world spins.

"A couple weeks on real food will have you back to normal."

Ziggy reaches for the sandwich, and Dillon yanks it out of his reach. Ziggy loses his balance and collapses, _hard_.

"But," continues Dillon. "I've got a condition. You should know you don't have any secrets from me, pal."

He leans over and yanks Ziggy's jacket off, revealing a set of vascular, freakishly thin arms striped horizontally in red.

"This _cutting _bullshit," says Dillon. "It stops now. I know about your legs too, so don't even try. You're not a thirteen-year-old girl and I'm not your mom, so I don't know what the fuck you think this little rebellion is supposed to accomplish, but if you keep it up you're going to find out what it's like to have your panic attacks in a straitjacket. Okay?"

Ziggy nods. He doesn't actually want to stop. Maybe he can't. But he knows he couldn't handle being tied up.

Dillon lets him eat the sandwich - he can only get about half of it down before the pain folds him in two - then leads him to a lab and hooks him up to two IVs.

Only a day later, Ziggy looks in the same mirror to see an otherwise healthy young man on the verge of starvation. The young man is wearing a clean set of baggy but stylish clothes - Ziggy's own. They must have come from the Garage, must have been delivered by his friends along with whatever else Dillon asked for, but Dillon won't admit it.

He just tells Ziggy to keep eating. There's a fridge and a blender and groceries now. They'll have a movie night when Ziggy looks human again, he says.

Then he hands Ziggy a set of scissors. "And deal with that mess. Try not to slit your wrists."

But Ziggy's still too tired to keep his hands above his head. He gets Tenaya to cut his hair. She doesn't let him keep the scissors.

The white streak in his hair, about an inch wide at the left temple, remains.

* * *

"Want to go for a drive?"

Ziggy can't have heard right.

"When you say 'a drive'..."

"In the Fury." Dillon drums his fingers on his thighs impatiently. "Your friends delivered. It's all repaired."

"A drive in the Fury with you. Like we used to. Like, outside?"

Dillon shrugs. "You're turning see-through. If you don't get some sun, I'm going to lose track of you."

"Well. Let me check my schedule. Tenaya, sweetie! Bring in the desk calendar!"

"Shut the fuck up, Ziggy."

The sun doesn't burn Ziggy's eyes the way he thought it might. It's a dusty day; brown clouds filter the sunlight and turn the sky and landscape a dull sepia.

It's perfect. Warm and homey. For a while, as Dillon zips around, Ziggy just lazily leans on the car door, hanging his head out the window, letting the air soak into his pores, enjoying the kiss of the sunlight. He imagines he can feel his skin soaking up the Vitamin D. He absorbs it like wine, like music.

He finds it's pleasant to see his face in the rearview. It's fuller and younger than it was before Dillon actually started taking care of him. From some angles, he's cute again. He's nearly back to his fighting weight.

Dillon seems to sense it as Ziggy feels more and more alive and awake; he starts taking harder turns, spraying up more sand, jumping higher hills. They both end up whooping at the tops of the jumps, when the exhaust pipe and the front guns belch fire.

"You know what, Zig?" Dillon asks as he whips the wheel right, practically sending Ziggy out the window. "I'm going soft."

"Oh? How so?"

They're about to broadside a dead tree, but Dillon manages to instead just get swept by the dangling branches, which _whoosh_ satisfyingly and leave a brown, brilliant explosion of twigs behind them.

"I'm a cold heartless killing machine, right?"

"Sure, mm-hmm."

"But I can't help it, man. I fucking love this car."

Ziggy grins. In this moment, he can let himself believe he's actually on the road with his best friend again.

"Only thing that would make it better is a working radio," Ziggy says. "You think it's fun now, try it with Zeppelin blowing the windshield out."

"Oh, the radio works," says Dillon. He shifts up and down, careering them through a pit full of scrub. "I souped it up. Electronics are kind of my thing. But I don't know anything about music. Go ahead, pick a song."

"Ho ho! Prepare for an _education_, buster! Shotgun on duty! You will not regret this!"

"Too late," says Dillon, but they both know he's joking.

It's difficult, being jostled constantly from side to side, but Ziggy figures out the radio. The old-timey dial pulls back to reveal what's essentially a touch-screen iPod with…

"Does this thing have every song ever written?" Ziggy asks over the howling engine.

"Just the recorded ones."

He builds a playlist of Led Zeppelin, Linkin Park, AC/DC, Guns N' Roses, Kansas, and Nirvana. No reason to go obscure yet, though as a person who went through a serious Emo phase, he absolutely can. Right now Dillon is still in the early stages of his pop culture education, and he needs the _classics._

An hour later, the two end up on top of a hill, half-deaf, filthy with road grit, grinning through the blasted windshield at the post-apocalyptic landscape with the glowing silhouette of the dome of Corinth swelling at the horizon line. Dillon reaches across Ziggy to open the glovebox, which turns out to contain a water bottle, a case of Jack Daniels, and about a hundred dollars' worth of hard candy.

The water bottle's for Ziggy. The Jack is for Dillon.

"You curse, you drink, you eat sweets, and you love your car," says Ziggy.

"Don't start," says Dillon.

"I just don't get it."

"Not a lot to get. I've never had a human body before. Kind of makes sense I'd want to try out the vices. Use all the senses and stuff. Plus, this guy" - he vaguely indicates his body - "doesn't have the processing power I'm used to. Didn't really think I'd have to use him as a host, he was kind of a crazy gambit I couldn't believe paid off. You people are so naive, it's wild. So he just doesn't have the hardware to hold everything I'm used to keeping in my head."

Ziggy tries to dissect this. "What does processing power have to do with drinking and candy?"

"Dumb people like sensory pleasures more than smart people. Right? That's what I hear. D-44 must be really dumb, because this shit is great." He waves his hand, indicating not the candy, but the whole landscape.

"You like being human," Ziggy translates.

"I'm trying to figure it out. Not used to having to figure things out. Like that music - it's just vibrations. Why the hell should it...do that?"

"Make you feel good?"

"Not just good. It's like the candy and the booze. _Flavors_. Sensations you don't have names for because you're a bunch of roided up monkeys. If I had my whole brain in this body, I could name them. Categorize them."

He catches Ziggy's eye and frowns. "Wipe that look off your face."

"Dillon," says Ziggy. He's trying not to giggle.

"_What?_"

"I've had this conversation before. With different people, but pretty much always under the same circumstances. You're high."

"High?"

"Like on drugs."

Dillon shakes the bottle doubtfully. He's only had a shot or two.

"Don't be so literal, ya cyborg!" says Ziggy. "You're high on having emotions for the first time. It's making you philosophical."

"You mean weak."

"Don't try to tell me you don't like it."

Dillon grips, releases, and grips the steering wheel. "No," he says. "I like it. But that's a good analogy. A drug."

He chugs on the bottle, hands it off to Ziggy, unwraps a Jolly Rancher, and stares at it.

"What the fuck is wrong with me?" he asks quietly.

After an awkward second, Ziggy says, "Nothing wrong from my end. At the moment. The drinking and junk food is actually a step up from trying to kill all my friends."

Dillon gives him the side-eye. "You're the worst part. I don't mean there's anything wrong with _you._ Though there is. A lot. You're terrible. But what's getting me is I'm having the hardest time figuring out…"

"Why you kept me," Ziggy finishes. He's aware this conversation could turn dangerous quickly, but it's so warm and comfortable in the car, he can't summon anything more than a slightly raised pulse.

"Why I _keep on _keeping you, yeah. And why I even took you in the first place. And why I have this urge to talk to you all the time. I talk as much as you do, almost! Can't just think things, gotta _say_ them. I never used to need to talk."

_Neither version of you_, Ziggy thinks.

"Drink," says Dillon.

"Um," says Ziggy. "Okay." He sniffs at the lip of the bottle and immediately has to try to suppress a gag.

Dillon watches and curls back a lip in disbelief. "Ziggy, I can't believe I don't know the answer to this. How old are you?"

"What month is it?"

"November."

"Then I am nineteen and one month."

Dillon bursts out laughing. "Wow," he says. "Not even old enough to drink. Is that your first hard liquor?"

Ziggy nods. "I sipped beer a couple times. And, as I mentioned, I have sampled some gases derived from exotic plants. Could give you an education on those too."

"_Drink_," says Dillon. "Happy late birthday, man."

Ziggy closes his eyes, summons his courage, and slugs back two gulps before choking and spraying whiskey all over the dash. Dillon grabs back the bottle and pounds him on the back a few times, chuckling.

When Ziggy recovers, he looks up to find Dillon staring out at the setting sun. Dillon's brown eyes are lit to a beautiful shade of amber, and his hair flops down into a perfect Superman loop. His profile is clean and sharp.

Ziggy has never wanted to kiss anyone so badly. The need for it sloshes through him, overwhelming him, clogging his ears, his veins, his lungs, his heart. Goosebumps rise on his arms, and heat pools deep in his stomach, stoked by the burning whiskey.

He can't move. If he touches anything, or if anything touches him - if he so much as shifts and lets his jeans create friction on his legs - he's going to lose control.

_Why not?_ he finds himself thinking.

On one level, the most superficial one, he knows it would be wrong even if Dillon wanted it. Because he's _not_ Dillon, he's Venjix, the most prolific mass murderer in history, and being attracted to someone, some_thing_ like that is so mind-bendingly stupid and evil it shouldn't even be possible.

On the other hand…

If anyone knew his situation, really understood it, could they blame him?

Ziggy, a man who lives for the company and approval of other people, has been alone for six months with someone identical to his stunningly gorgeous best friend, who, okay, okay, he was in love with. Said gorgeous best friend lookalike is his only source of conversation, comfort, entertainment, pleasure. Ziggy is starved for touch. For experience, sensation. Love. Anything like love.

What harm would it do? If someone _did_ get hurt, it wouldn't be anyone but Ziggy.

Dillon apparently feels Ziggy's stare. He glances sideways, then, seeing Ziggy's expression, darts his eyeline straight out to the horizon again.

"Guess we've gotta get back," he says.

"Do we?" asks Ziggy. He tries to make his voice cool and neutral, but it cracks.

He sees Dillon's eyes flicker down, and knows what he notices: Their thighs are only maybe two inches apart. Their knees are almost touching.

Despite what Dillon just said about himself, Ziggy knows damn well he's not dumb. He can always tell exactly what Ziggy is thinking. They're both drunk and high on music and adventure and sugar and whiskey, and electricity is practically jumping between them.

Ziggy stares until he can no longer be ignored, and Dillon makes eye contact.

Ball's in his court.

"Ziggy," he says.

"Yeah?"

"I still think...I still think you don't really understand."

"Understand what?"

"About Dillon. You think he's still in here somewhere. But he's not."

A fist clamps on Ziggy's heart, but he doesn't react.

Dillon continues: "He never was. He wasn't real. He wasn't alive. D-44 was. The guy I took the body from. Jason Dillahunty, aspiring actor, kind of a prick."

"Jason Dillahunty." Ziggy croaks out the name. It sounds about right.

"But you never met him," says Dillon. "He died in the pit. The guy you met, who I named Dillon, was just a program inserted into that body: an extension of me, a personality profile I thought would be appealing, a set of props and backstory to draw the Rangers in. He operated independently most of the time - I mean, I wasn't personally making choices for him, he had enough AI to function alone - but he couldn't feel. There wasn't a soul in there. Just a slick computer program."

Ziggy swallows. He slides a few inches away from Dillon. "You didn't know him," he says.

"I made him."

"He was real."

"He was a few electronic impulses animating a meat suit."

"And what do you think _I _am?" Ziggy cries. "Or any human? Just a bunch of electricity jumping around in our brains. Squishy computers. _You're_ a program, and you're sitting in his body now. Going to tell me you don't feel anything? That you're not real? You didn't expect it to feel the way it does in there, did you? Maybe you made Dillon, but you didn't know what you were doing, and you don't know what you made. He was real."

Ziggy kicks the footwell. Again. Again. He leans against the door, hating the fact that he can't restrain the tears squeezing themselves out of his eyes.

Dillon reaches for him as if to ruffle his hair, then hesitates. His hand points towards Ziggy's shoulder, his arm, his thigh. He obviously can't decide where to put it, and at last, he brings it to the car keys.

The engine turns over, and the ride home begins.

Ziggy, watching the sun dip below the horizon, is only partially miserable.

He doesn't know what's going to happen between him and Dillon, what he wishes had happened, what he wants to happen…

But he at last has the relief of _understanding_.

He gets what's happening to Venjix - why he's sometimes himself, sometimes Dillon, and often a third, strange person who is neither good nor evil, but confused and in need of constant reassurance.

Ziggy never did meet Jason Dillahunty, but he's willing to guess the aspiring actor really liked to talk.

* * *

That night, Ziggy draws Dillon the way he looked with the sunset lighting up his eyes. In trying to choose the colors, he realizes the scene was all shades of gold: Gold sunshine, skin, irises, hair, and the black leather jacket reflecting it all.

When he's done, he stares at the face - not perfect, not exactly what he remembered, but close enough - and feels the urge to cut himself. He can do it. He sometimes uses the playing cards. And maybe if he does, Dillon will come in here and stop him, yell at him, touch him, hit him, even, and it will be attention. Time together. It'll prove Dillon cares. And if he doesn't, well, it will scratch Ziggy's itch. The extreme anxiety, the sensation that there's crystalline poison in his blood, shards of it shredding his heart, eroding it, and he needs to clean his whole system out.

But cutting turns out to be unnecessary.

Ziggy is grinding his teeth, trying to sleep with his forehead pressed to his small desk, hunched over his drawing like a schoolboy simultaneously napping and hiding his graffiti from a roving teacher, when he hears Dillon stumble heavily against the frame of the entryway. There's no door on the room.

Even from six feet away, Ziggy can smell the alcohol on Dillon's breath.

Ziggy doesn't move, though he's instantly wide awake. A zen sense of acceptance sweeps over him: _This is it_. He knows that smell, that pause, that clumsy step in the middle of the night. He's not as innocent as they all think he is.

In fact, in this scenario, for once he might have more of a clue than Dillon.

Dillon's footfalls are loud and uneven as he approaches. He puts his whole weight on the back of Ziggy's spindly chair.

"Zig." Just one syllable, but it's as telling as his step. It's thick and slow. Dillon is _shit-faced_. How much alcohol must it have taken, with his superhuman tolerance?

Dillon leans over Ziggy's hunched back. His head falls even with Ziggy's; their ears brush, and Dillon's breath is hot on his cheek. The solidity and warmth of his chest soak into Ziggy's back. "Let me see," he says.

Easy as falling, Ziggy leans back into him, letting Dillon see the sketchpad. Dillon places his hands on the desk, completely trapping Ziggy. Dillon's putting off heat like a radiator.

"It's good," he says. "You're getting really good. It looks just like him."

_Him._ Jason? Dillon? Which one of the personalities has Ziggy in the inescapable cage of his body right now?

Dillon places his hands on Ziggy's. Runs them up his bare arms, squeezes his shoulders awkwardly, runs them back down, puts them back on the desk. Breathes next to Ziggy's ear.

_He doesn't know how to start this._

Ziggy almost sighs out loud.

And he turns, just an inch or two, and catches Dillon's lips with his own.

Dillon groans into his mouth: a loud and obvious sound of relief.

Dillon pulls him up - they're still back-to-chest, but now the chair's out of the way - and pulls Ziggy hard against him, keeping their mouths together, their tongues working. Ziggy has to stretch to meet Dillon's greater height. Dillon's hands rove hungrily up and down Ziggy's front; Ziggy reaches behind himself and pulls Dillon in closer, rubbing against his erection, making them both moan. The awkward angle, in Ziggy's opinion, actually makes it hotter. They have to strain to make it work.

For long seconds, they just stand there kissing, hands moving, Ziggy's throat and chest arched out, exposed. Dillon's mouth is everything he thought it would be. Hot and warm and strong and soft. It tastes of whiskey. His kiss is sloppy, without technique. He doesn't know what he's doing. That's fine.

Dillon's roving hands find Ziggy's T-shirt collar and yank; the fabric parts like Kleenex and falls away. Dillon's fingers knead against Ziggy's ribs, run over them like xylophone keys, press into the soft tissue between them. Ziggy is amazed at his ability to do this without hurting him. The man is strong enough to tear the metal skin off a Zord - Ziggy saw him do it once, during the escape from Corinth - and he's plastered and rock hard and letting loose, but still he's managing to keep his fingers from even bruising Ziggy's fragile skin. It wouldn't be so terrible, Ziggy thinks, if he left a few bruises.

Ziggy breaks the kiss so he can breathe. A line of saliva still connects the two men. With a frustrated noise, Dillon kisses it away, leaving a wet spot on Ziggy's chin, and they both laugh a little, letting some tension out. Ziggy turns to face Dillon, whose hands drop to Ziggy's narrow hips.

The look in Dillon's eyes is alarming: his lids are drooping with liquor, but beneath that, there's a sadness, a _lostness_ that Ziggy knows he will be forced to analyze later. He had rather thought that when this moment came, it would be a power play; Dillon would perhaps be frustrated enough with Ziggy to try out yet another vice on him, maybe violently, or use his knowledge of Ziggy's attachment to toy with him, or simply be bored and experimenting, with no emotion involved at all.

That's not what he's experiencing. In fact, when Ziggy untucks Dillon's shirt and begins working on his fly, Dillon stops him.

"Go sslow," he slurs. His hands, huge and powerful, move to the small of Ziggy's back. He circles his thumbs near Ziggy's spine, and each circle seems to send a new wave of blood to Ziggy's aching erection, which Ziggy rubs against Dillon's thigh.

"Slow? You sure, big guy?" How, Ziggy wonders, is his voice steady _now,_ of all times?

"Yeah," says Dillon. He moves Ziggy's hands up to his chest, then takes Ziggy's face in his hands. "I don't know _why_ the fuck I want this, but I do."

His kiss is a little more technically proficient this time. Small darts of the tongue at first, small tastes, experiments. Then deeper, harder, longer. They take turns in each other's mouths. It's Ziggy who makes the big first moves, the longer, deeper thrusts; Dillon, it seems, wants to savor the moment, while Ziggy wants their actions to match the urgency of his own racing pulse.

The bed can barely be called that. It's a small black mattress, no sheets, blankets, or pillows, on a chair-height shelf in the wall. Ziggy manages to guide Dillon to it and sit him down.

Dillon allows Ziggy to strip his shirt off. His chest is stunning. Acres of gently cut muscle, smooth pink skin. Soft as it needs to be and hard as it needs to be in exactly the right places.

He raises his chin so Ziggy can kiss the straining tendons of his neck, then arches his back so Ziggy can lick his way across his collarbone and down, until he's working his tongue into Dillon's navel. Dillon's erection is straining against his jeans, and when Ziggy brushes his fingers over it, Dillon groans and shudders.

"Fuck," he says. He returns his hands to Ziggy's back, aimlessly feeling out the planes. His head is lolling. "I thought it might be kind of like this, but I didn't...fuck."

"It's like the music, huh?" asks Ziggy.

"And the candy. And driving."

Ziggy laughs. "I think I can beat driving."

Again, he goes for Dillon's fly; again, Dillon stops him. Ziggy lets out an undignified shriek as he finds himself lifted up in the air (Dillon holds him there for a second, arms straight out, as if to show off his casual, beautiful strength), and then seated on Dillon's lap, where Dillon holds him still and kisses and licks his chest, his shoulders, his scarred arms, his sides.

Ziggy's eyes drift closed. There's pleasure here, yes, even happiness, and he tries to let himself enjoy it, but his anxiety is still at a nine. He thinks having Dillon inside him will relieve it somehow, like the cutting. Maybe it will hurt enough to anchor him.

He grinds their crotches together, then scoots even further forward and crushes his ass against Dillon's cock, sliding up and down until Dillon actually _growls_.

"You trying to make me come in my pants?" he says.

"I've been trying to get you out of your pants for fifteen minutes!"  
At last, Dillon lets him at that goddamn button and zipper. He hisses as his cock springs free, and they both watch in fascination as Ziggy draws his fingertips along it and it twitches in response.

Ziggy tumbles himself off Dillon's lap, squirms between his legs, and looks up.

"You're not going to tell me to go slow _now_, are you?"

Dillon rolls his eyes - _have it your way_ \- and buries his fingers in Ziggy's hair.

Ziggy goes to town, practically choking himself on Dillon's cock, loving the agonized sounds he's able to draw out of his friend. He's good at this. Hands and mouth, the two places he has inarguable skill and practice.

Dillon begins cursing, just a stream of repeated, uncreative, old-fashioned curse words, twenty or so in a row, and rocks in his seat, thrusting involuntarily. Unsympathetic, Ziggy works harder, gagging himself, letting the head of Dillon's engorged cock pound the back of his throat.

It doesn't take long; Dillon's thighs shudder together, trapping Ziggy in place, and his hands clamp on either side of Ziggy's head as he gives an inarticulate shout and comes, hot and hard, in Ziggy's mouth.

Ziggy swallows what he can. The rest oozes out around his lips, soaking Dillon's cock. He leans back and stares up at his…

Friend? Enemy? He doesn't fucking know. Dillon's eyes are brighter, more awake now, and he stares down at Ziggy with something like awe. The alcohol must be wearing off. His enhanced system can burn through toxin loads that would easily kill a human.

Also, Ziggy's pretty sure his recovery time will be minimal. He's not worried that they're done.

"Now…" Dillon pushes a lock of hair off his forehead and it falls right back into place. "Now I help you out, right?"

"That's how it's traditionally done, yes. You okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Thanks."

Dillon blinks a few times and digs his fingers into Ziggy's scalp. "What do I do?" he asks. "I mean, what do you want me to do to you?"

Ziggy gets them both standing. He removes his own pants, then Dillon's, and presses their naked bodies together lengthwise. He was right; Dillon's already hard again. Still, he'll feel a bit classless if he asks directly for what he wants.

"Tradition also dictates," he hears himself saying, "that the smaller of the two men involved in an act...of this nature...the small spoon, if you will, is usually the one who-"

"Shut up," Dillon says. "I get the picture."

He's smiling, a real, genuine, white smile, and he's beautiful and shining and Ziggy can't look away…

Which is why, for the first time, he actually sees it happen.

He _sees_ the personality shift. It's not just a change in expression, or in the atmosphere in the room. There's a physical motion behind Dillon's soft brown irises, like that of an old-fashioned film camera shutter. A click, a falling shut of a door.

And there's someone else looking out at him through those eyes.

Dillon's smile tightens into a sneer.

"Go on, Zig," he says. "Turn around."

_Well_, Ziggy thinks. _You wanted it to hurt. Maybe you better get rid of that monkey's paw before you make your next wish, genius._

He doesn't turn fast enough. Dillon grabs him, his strength absolutely inexorable. Ziggy wouldn't be able to fight him even if he were simply a human with Dillon's advantages of height, weight, and muscle; and of course, he's _not _simply a human.

"W-w-wait. Ea-Easy there, buddy," Ziggy stammers, staring at the wall.

"I thought we were done with going slow," Dillon says.

Ziggy considers attempting to continue the conversation - to casually say something about lube and size, as if he hasn't noticed the shift. Hell, Dillon probably doesn't even know what just happened. He's never seemed to notice his own mood swings.

But as Ziggy is shoved to his knees, and feels the bruises already starting to form under Dillon's suddenly-too-hard touch, he knows his luck has run out. The good in Dillon's system, the affection, the smiles, the remains of his friend have been used up for today, burned up like the alcohol in his bloodstream. All Ziggy can do for the next few minutes is try to keep his mouth shut and hope that tomorrow it'll be Dillon, not Venjix, who picks him up and makes sure his injuries aren't going to kill him.

It ends up being not quite as bad as he fears. Still pretty bad.

Dillon uses spit for lube, and it's not enough. In response to Ziggy's initial cry of pain, he says, partially articulating Ziggy's own thoughts, "You going to tell me this isn't what you wanted? What you _asked for,_ you little faggot?"

He goes way too fast. Too deep. Too hard.

He does seem, on some level, to want Ziggy to like it. He reaches around and strokes Ziggy's cock, and his thrusts mostly level out to an intensity level that only borders on injurious.

Mostly.

Ziggy knows he's bleeding. And he's hurt internally, he can feel it when Dillon goes deep.

And the words keep coming. Fag. Twink. Bitch. What, are you going to cry, you fucking pussy?

And then the hitting starts.

They're not real hits, obviously. Dillon would punch a hole through Ziggy if he struck him in earnest. But it's no playful spanking. Ziggy is all bones; even his ass has only the thinnest layer of padding. Every strike cracks through his whole body. He feels like a sheet being taken from the dryer and snapped in the air. And it happens again and again, until he thinks his bones must be pulverized from the repeated jolts alone.

He thinks it will never end. Dillon wants him to come, orders him to over and over, but Ziggy can't. He's frightened and hurting, and though he may be a masochist, this is beyond even his ability to enjoy.

Finally, Dillon pulls out, but he's not done. He flips Ziggy onto his back and pins him to the ground with one hand around his neck. His fingers are so long they practically meet in the back.

"I like to finish what I start," he says, squeezing. Ziggy scrabbles at Dillon's wrist, but it might as well be a traffic pole for all he's able to move it.

Dillon's free hand once again travels to Ziggy's cock. He adjusts his grip to make sure Ziggy is able to watch.

The tip of his index finger pops open, as Ziggy has seen it do once before, revealing intricate hardware. Ziggy remembers the laser and instantly panics; he thrashes wildly, like a cat in a snare, and Dillon chuckles.

"Relax," he says. "I've helped you all this time. You ought to trust me by now."

A tiny arc of electricity jumps from his finger to Ziggy's testicles.

Even as Ziggy screams in terror, his cock springs up, hard and straight as a soldier. He can't stop it.

A couple more jolts, a couple more screams, and Ziggy comes involuntarily. It's not pleasurable. His semen goes everywhere as his cock jumps and dances under Dillon's control.

The sight works for Dillon; he releases Ziggy and pumps himself a couple times until he ejaculates on Ziggy's stomach.

"Thanks, pal," says Dillon. He leans over Ziggy, who is now just trying to lie flat, to spread as much of his skin as he can along the cool floor, perhaps merge with it so he won't have to get up again. Dillon kisses him on the mouth, sticking his tongue in possessively and making Ziggy pray for unconsciousness, anything to end this.

Finally he rises, and Ziggy can see there's a ring of dark blood around the base of Dillon's cock.

"See you in the morning."

He's gone.

Ziggy can neither sleep nor move.

He stares up at the ceiling, hoping the bleeding stops on its own, and that the welts he can feel rising all over his body won't hurt as bad as they'll look tomorrow.

At least he no longer feels any urge to cut.

* * *

Dillon doesn't bring up their encounter the next time he calls Ziggy into the viewing chamber. He doesn't say much at all, not even when he manages to delete Gem and Gemma while Ziggy cries.

The other Rangers win the fight, but Gem and Gemma don't reappear.

* * *

Ziggy has filled ten notebooks with drawings. He doesn't leave his room much anymore. Paper and fresh pencils appear when he needs them.

He and Dillon have had sex twice more. Once, it was okay. Dillon didn't speak much, or smile, but he was more or less careful not to aggravate Ziggy's injuries. It was only oral sex.

The next time was as bad as the first. Worse, in fact, because Ziggy was already sore. But he didn't fight it.

He wonders if he should. Would it make him feel better about himself?

His anxiety, at least, seems to be under control for now. He's in a little bit of pain all the time, and that calms him; his thoughts are able to center on the immediate moment instead of the future, or on wild speculation, self-hatred, and self-doubt. He no longer feels constantly on the verge of a heart attack.

He does wonder if real medical attention is in order, since his underwear still end up bloody from time to time, but he thinks if it were, Dillon would know before he would.

He attempts a small rebellion: One day he stops eating. It's easy; his appetite was always small, and for a while, it's felt like his stomach is full of rocks. He's supposed to eat a meal at least every eight hours; the wall unit acts as a timer for him, since there are no clocks and no other way to tell time inside the fortress walls.

After twenty-four hours, Tenaya appears and drags Ziggy in front of Dillon. There's a meal prepared there, and Ziggy wonders if Tenaya had to make it. A small steak, vegetables, a roll.

Ziggy is placed on a chair in front of the food.

"Your choice, buddy," says Dillon. "Easy way or hard way."

Ziggy eats very slowly. It's not a big meal, not at all, but the last few bites are like swallowing cotton balls. Dillon watches him the whole time.

* * *

Ziggy thinks he's been summoned to watch another fight with the Rangers, but when he gets to the viewing chamber, he is greeted with a sight so surreal he briefly thinks it must be a hallucination.

There's a couch sitting there. Not a Venjix-style black leather couch, either, but a comfy, used floral print one from somebody's house.

Dillon's sitting on the floor at the couch's base, leaning back against it, barefoot, eating from a bowl of popcorn. An open box of pepperoni pizza sits beside him; he's already had two slices. There's also an unopened two-liter of soda and a box of breadsticks. Dillon looks bizarrely young.

The men make eye contact, and Ziggy immediately knows - as if the tableau hadn't been evidence enough - that today Dillon is his kinder, friendlier self. What a relief. It's been all Venjix for days.

"Hey...there," says Ziggy. "What's the occasion?"

"You said you wanted a movie night," says Dillon.

Yeah, Ziggy said that. A lifetime ago.

"I remembered," says Dillon, "because you said something about Christmas movies? It's Christmas."

For some reason, this information staggers Ziggy. He nearly falls over. "Really? Today?"

"Well, Christmas Eve. We could still watch Hocus Pocus if you want."

Ziggy doesn't respond. He has an image of his friends in pajamas gathered around a Christmas tree in the garage. He never had a Christmas with them, but he can guess Flynn would make it quite an occasion. They'd have monogrammed stockings and a fire and presents. Good food. Dr. K might even participate.

Are they thinking of him right now?

They're probably thinking of Gem and Gemma. Probably there isn't a tree this year at all - not with fully half the team lost. More than half. Dillon, Ziggy, Gem, Gemma.

They're losing everything. Quickly.

"Hey. Grover. What movie?"

"A Christmas Story," says Ziggy.

He tries to sit on the floor beside Dillon, but gets a quick, painful reminder that he's in no shape to be sitting on metal, and hops up onto the couch. It's just right. Like a couch at a friend's house where you're allowed to stay the night. Ziggy is almost able to get comfortable.

Dillon watches him adjust his seat with a grim expression, then gets up to join him, bringing the pizza and popcorn.

He looks at the screen, where the movie is beginning, and mutters, "Sorry about that."

Ziggy, also staring straight ahead, nods.

The movie is as good as he remembers. Even Dillon chuckles from time to time. He's still not talking much, and Ziggy likes that. It means that the _real_ Dillon's personality is in the forefront. He's not with Jason or Venjix, but his old friend, or at least as much of his friend as can come to the surface anymore.

They eat a lot. All the popcorn and most of the rest of the food.

Halfway through the movie, Dillon puts his arm around Ziggy's shoulder.

It's not a sexual move. It's an apology, and, perhaps, a signal: _It's okay, lie down, I'm not going to hurt you._ Lying on his side, Ziggy is more comfortable, and he ends up with his head in Dillon's lap. Dillon calmly curls a few locks of Ziggy's hair around his fingers.

They stay in that position through the movie credits. Ziggy falls asleep in Dillon's arms, and wakes up alone on the couch.

It disappears the next day.

* * *

Ziggy finally finds himself a purpose.

He notes the patterns.

The triggers.

What makes Dillon tick.

This is how he can be useful to his friends and all of Corinth: Gathering information on what is going on in Venjix's mind and body.

Venjix, he concludes, is always in control of the superego. Even when Dillon - Ziggy still thinks of the _body_ as Dillon - is at his kindest, his plans to infiltrate Corinth and kill its inhabitants, starting with the Power Rangers, never fully cease. Even when he feels sorriest for Ziggy, it never seems to occur to him to release him, or to give him real comforts and accommodations that would give him a meaningful life outside of his relationship with Dillon. There's never a moment where Dillon sits up and cries, "Wait, aren't I on the Rangers' side?" or anything of that nature. Somewhere in there is a firewall that all the personality in the world can't cross. Yet.

Dillon, Ziggy's friend, is always in control of the id: the physical preferences. Everything the body likes to eat, drink, view, wear, do for fun, and… be attracted to… comes from Dillon.

It could be that Jason Dillahunty was gay, but Ziggy doesn't think so, after getting to know Jason as well as he can. The man is a mass of neuroses, nearly a worse nervous wreck than Ziggy is, and in some ways, especially in decisiveness, he _is_ worse. Ziggy doubts he was capable of the kind of obsessive devotion Dillon is showing for Ziggy.

Ziggy dwells on this a lot. If he's right, it explains almost everything. It explains why Venjix didn't kill him, why he kidnapped him, why he keeps him alive, why he sometimes shows great affection and caring, and where the sexual angle comes from.

It doesn't explain why Dillon never showed any attraction to Ziggy before Venjix took him over. Ziggy had always had the strong impression that his crush was one-sided. Dillon had only had eyes for Summer.

Hadn't he?

Ziggy finds he can't remember a specific instance of Dillon courting or mooning over Summer. In fact, all he can remember is them butting heads. He can actually remember more potentially romantic moments between Dillon and Scott than Dillon and Summer. But he'd had the distinct impression…

Well. Everything Dillon liked back when he was a Power Ranger, he still seems to like now that Venjix has taken over. Ziggy will just allow that to include himself, for now.

Jason Dillahunty, the original owner of the body, is the wild card, and he's Ziggy's biggest source of hope and worry.

Jason, like the other two personalities, is always present in a way. He slows them down, gums up the works. Ziggy thinks he might be hoarding all the processing power that would otherwise go to Venjix. He's a needy, insecure, indecisive talker. Back when he was an actor, he must have been painful to interact with, but he's quite useful to Ziggy in restraining Venjix's more extreme tendencies. Venjix can't seem to carry through any evil plan with the passion and single-mindedness he used to have. At the same time, Dillon can't enjoy sex or food or driving without swaying into a dialogue about why he's enjoying it, and whether it's the right thing for him - Venjix, as he thinks of himself - to do, but that doesn't do Ziggy any harm. Jason's nerves are probably the source of the alcoholism.

So they're all in there, a confusing mix. But Ziggy starts to be able to tell who's in the forefront at any given time.

None is in control for longer than three days, Ziggy is sure of that. He starts making notes in his drawings. He uses codes he makes up himself, hiding them as swirly designs in the borders of every picture. Red for Venjix. Black for Dillon. Green for Jason. He tries to go back in time and remember what order events happened in so he can build a timeline.

Some triggers speed up the transformations. Alcohol is the first that Ziggy becomes certain of. While the body is drunk, Jason or Dillon is in control. He'll be talkative or lustful, depending on which, and both are pleasant for Ziggy. But when he comes out of the drunken haze, it's always Venjix that rises and blinks at Ziggy with clear eyes, a mean sober.

So that's useful: Alcohol to calm Dillon down, but only if Ziggy's willing to deal with the truly evil hangover.

Sex is a mixed bag. Oh, who he's dealing with is obvious enough at all times: Venjix is sadistic, Dillon is giving and slow-going, Jason is insecure. But the act itself doesn't seem to trigger changes; orgasms, at least, don't alter the personality as far as Ziggy can tell. He does find one trick: during the act, avoid prolonged eye contact. After a couple of encounters that start sweetly and end horribly, he learns to keep his eyes down. Which sucks, because he loves to look at Dillon's face, and Dillon even asks him a few times, hurt, why Ziggy won't look at him.

But that's only during sex. Eye contact at other times doesn't seem to do much harm.

He can bring Jason forward by simply asking a lot of questions. The man feeds on an interested audience, on explaining his ideas, plans, thought processes. Venjix is in control enough to keep actual useful information secret from Ziggy, but Ziggy suspects he's still giving up more than he intends to in every conversation.

Like Jason's name. That had just slipped out, casually, and it has so far been the key to everything.

Ziggy wonders about the man. Worries about him.

In particular, he thinks about what happened to Tenaya. From what he understands, Tenaya 7 retained most of her human personality after Venjix first remade her. The personality eventually became too strong and reasserted itself, along with memories long thought erased. When this happened, Tenaya briefly regained control of herself and switched loyalties.

As a result, she was tossed back in the pit and came out as Tenaya 15: Empty shell edition.

Jason reappeared in the body rather suddenly, and is every bit as prominent a personality as Venjix and Dillon, if not more so. He's the most easily accessed of the three.

What if he's getting stronger? Waking up? This hardware-in-humans thing was apparently a new technology when it was tried on Dillon and Tenaya, and it seems to have not worked perfectly.

What if Jason takes over the body entirely, the way Tenaya did? That would be wonderful news for the world.

But what will happen to Dillon?

And Ziggy has a rather darker fear, which is that Jason will wake up and start to assert himself, but slowly - slowly enough for Venjix to figure out what's going on and toss _himself_ into the pit. Maybe dump Dillon's body for a new one entirely. In fact, Ziggy can't figure out why Venjix hasn't done this already. It should have been done half a year ago.

If it happens, Ziggy, Jason, and Dillon will all die, and Corinth will be in greater danger than ever.

Ziggy tries to think of a scenario in which this all ends with only Dillon in the body, back to himself again, and he can't. Dillon is the one with the least claim to be there. The middleman. It's a testament to the strength of his personality that he's able to take control as often as he is.

The different men have a few obvious tells. It's always Jason in control when the drinking starts. Always Dillon in control when the eating starts. Always Venjix when the insults start.

Oddly, Jason also seems to be prominent right before the long periods of absence. Where does he go? He never tells.

* * *

A real victory, at last, for the Rangers, and of course it can't be a happy moment for Ziggy; no, he's got to flinch and writhe and groan in agony as he watches them take out Tenaya.

It's Dillon's fault. He's been off his game, tossing out bots for the Rangers to kill without any clear strategy, and sometimes before they're fully ready. This one was full of bugs. It lost control of the left half of its body partway through the battle, freeing up two Zords to chase after Tenaya and her team of Grinders, for whom the bot was supposed to be a decoy. She ends up partly crushed under a wheel of Summer's Bear Crawler. Her right arm, upper right chest, and nearly the whole of her head are taken out.

The peek inside her skin reveals what Ziggy already knew: She was all robot. Nothing human left there to mourn. There's no blood. Not even a few remnants of brain.

Still, Ziggy will miss her. Hers was the only human face he saw daily, besides Dillon's. He talked to her. Projected personality traits on her that made him feel better, like he had a friend.

He's more upset than Dillon is, as far as he can tell. Dillon watches the moment without blinking, makes no noise, and simply turns off the viewing screen shortly after the Rangers begin dragging away Tenaya's body.

"Remember, Zig," he says upon hearing Ziggy's sniffles behind him. "She wasn't really my sister."

"I wasn't crying for you," Ziggy snaps.

"She's been dead for years. She didn't feel any pain this time."

"Fine. Good."

"Okay."

"Okay."

* * *

Dillon has grown to love the movie nights, if their frequency is any indication. They happen more often than attack bot fight nights now.

Ziggy loves them too. Dillon's never turned evil during one, and he always lets Ziggy pick the movies. Good food, good entertainment, good company.

He's gotten the impression that Dillon uses these nights as tacit apologies. They often come soon after very bad Venjix episodes. Today, Ziggy has a busted eardrum, so he isn't surprised when he wanders out and sees the couch ready to go. He can't help but smile.

_You're looking forward to your date night with the guy who murdered Gem and Gemma_.

_Yeah, and seven billion other people. And he beat the shit out of me before breakfast. Reason isn't a factor here._

"So what's it gonna be, champ?"

Ziggy chuckles at the sight of Dillon. He's carrying a bucket of fried chicken and an almost-equally-large bucket of macaroni.

"How do you eat like this and stay so fit?"

"Eh, the nanobots in my blood burn most of it off. You know I don't really need to eat. Just like to."

"But where do you get the food?"

"From restaurants, where do you think?"

Dillon plops the buckets on the couch, leaves, and returns with drinks and utensils.

"Doesn't everybody in Corinth know your face?" Ziggy asks.

"Nah. Humans are clueless. I put on a hat, keep my head down, walk in the back, take what I want, leave. Telling you, I don't want to give up this body till you're all dead. It's way stealthier than the giant mecha suits."

"Well, maybe if you didn't decorate their heads with moving sex toys…"

"They were _signal boosters_, asshole. Pick the movie!"

Ziggy knows it doesn't really matter what movie he picks. Dillon has liked everything so far. Last time he took a risk and picked The Wizard of Oz, figuring its iconic nature would make up for its distinctly girlie slant. Dillon had loved it. Not that he'd said as much. He never actually praises the movies. But he had been completely absorbed the whole time.

About an hour in, he had asked Ziggy, "You trying to tell me something? I'm the Tin Man?"

"You're kind of the opposite of the Tin Man," Ziggy had pointed out. "He's metal on the _outside._"

"If I only had a heart, though, right? You're pathetic."

"I'm amazed," Ziggy had said. "For once you've overestimated me. I literally never had a single deep thought about this movie or its symbolic connections to you. I just like the scarecrow and the colors. But keep projecting, it's very interesting."

Dillon hadn't murdered him for the comment, opting instead to eat an entire roll of powdered sugar donuts. He'd watched the rest of the movie and declared the ending bullshit, but he hadn't fooled Ziggy.

"Tonight," says Ziggy. "Superman. The first one, with Christopher Reeve."

"Brightly colored superheroes." Dillon rolls his eyes. "You people."

"Sounds like you need extra convincing! We'll do a double feature. Superman I and II, but II _has_ to be the Donner cut, because-"

Dillon collapses. Just goes down like an anvil from the sky.

Somewhere deep in the building, an alarm goes off. The lights flash. Dillon's writhing on the ground, hands to his head, his face a mask of pain. It's only a few seconds before the scream he's trying to hold back comes ripping out of him.

Ziggy leaps up. He looks around, expecting Tenaya or helpful Grinders to appear, but they don't.

Dillon curls into fetal position, gasping, eyes tightly shut, and Ziggy grabs a cushion off the couch and tucks it under his head, whispering, "Hey, hey, what's wrong, what's happening? Dillon, talk to me!"

A hideous noise like a chair being dragged across a floor comes out of Dillon, and then he gasps, "K! It's fucking K! She hacked me! She's trying to cut me off-AGH!"

Dillon lashes out blindly. If he'd grabbed Ziggy in that moment, with that bear-trap hand, Ziggy would be down a leg; as is, Dillon ends up destroying the console supporting the viewscreen. He digs into its protective sheet metal, ripping it away in strips, then reduces the insides to spark-spewing garbage.

"A scrambler code," Dillon cries. "She's scrambling my my my signals my signals."

Whoa.

"I can sto-sto-stop her," he continues. "Just need a minute- A few calculations-"

Then he's writhing again, tears leaking from his squashed-shut eyes. His elevated pulse throbs in a vein beside his Adam's apple.

Ziggy kneels at his side, in agony for him. Perhaps he should resist the urge to comfort Dillon, but he's soft, and his captivity has only made him softer. He can't bear this, can't bear to see Dillon in pain in spite of all the pain he's caused. Whatever. Fuck you, conscience, you've been no help at all.

To the best of his ability, he pulls Dillon off the ground and up onto his lap. He rocks him, whispering in his ear. Nothing meaningful. "It'll be okay, you'll be okay, I know it hurts." Dillon writhes and gasps; he grabs at Ziggy's clothing, clearly looking for a handhold to pull himself away from his pain.

The fit lasts about five minutes. Five _very long_ minutes.

It ends with Dillon gasping and panting on his back, staring wide-eyed up at the ceiling, soaked in sweat (Ziggy has never seen him sweat before) and pale as paper. Ziggy strokes his hair and watches his eyes. They don't move, not even when Ziggy waves a hand in front of them.

_Kill him_.

The air and strength whoosh out of Ziggy seconds after the thought crosses his mind, shortly followed up with: _You HAVE to. Right now. You have a weapon. No excuses._

It's the chance he should have been looking for all this time, though he hasn't been, not really, not at all.

Dillon is totally incapacitated, his neck is exposed, and beside him is the sheet metal he's torn to ribbons. One of the strips is triangular - a perfect knife.

Ziggy could save the world. Right now.

He might die here as a result, might starve to death trying to escape the fortress, but of course that's not what slows him down.

_Don't be stupid. Dillon's not in there_.

But he is.

_It doesn't matter. Future of mankind here, Operator Series Green._

Fuck. Ziggy hates, hates, _hates_ how quickly and firmly he has come to the inarguable conclusion that there is no way around this. There's no wriggle room here. He doesn't even have the luxury of taking a few minutes to build up his courage; Dillon could regain consciousness any second.

Picking up the knife is easy enough. Ziggy doesn't even have to move from his position with Dillon's head on his lap.

Pressing the tip to Dillon's throat is harder, but doable.

Now Ziggy has to apply pressure.

He realizes he's been holding his breath. It gushes out of him and he gulps air, hiccups, looks around for someone to stop him. Where are Venjix's guards? Emergency protocols? If the lights could just go out…

They don't. Ziggy's held the knife to Dillon's throat for about thirty seconds now. Too long.

Ziggy's not ready to be alone here. They were supposed to have a movie night. A couple more, and Ziggy could have brought Dillon around, he's sure of it…

_Dillon would want you to._

He presses. Dillon's eyes widen, but his body remains slack.

It's more physically difficult than Ziggy thought it would be; the tip of the metal triangle goes in, and a dark marble of blood rolls down its edge, but it's going to take a good hard pull to slit Dillon's throat.

His friend's beautiful features blur as tears pool in Ziggy's eyes. He takes a deep breath. Cries out. Starts to pull.

"That won't be necessary, Operator Series Green."

The knife clatters to the ground, followed by small gouts of blood. The neck wound is only a centimeter wide. Already healing, in fact; Ziggy can see the edges re-knitting together thanks to the nanobots in Dillon's blood.

Ziggy doesn't look up at first. What will he see in K's eyes?

It turns out to be only kindness and sorrow.

K's hair has grown out a bit. It's shoulder-length now, and her hand-cropped bangs have become face-framing waves. Her face is thinner. She looks older, in a good way. She kneels before Ziggy, bringing herself down to his eye level, and as she does so, her hologram projection wobbles.

"That was very brave, Series Green. If I had any doubts about your continued loyalty to the people of Corinth-"

"My name is Ziggy."

She purses her lips. "...you've resolved them. Hold out your hand."

When Ziggy doesn't - he's so tired of all the bullshit - Dr. K understands and clarifies. "I'm going to teleport a tool to you. Your morpher was destroyed, but some components of the teleportation technology still work, especially for small objects. Fortunately, they're still programmed to find your biosigns. Please hold out your hand...Ziggy."

He does. K taps at a keyboard Ziggy can't see.

"Are the others watching?" he asks while he waits.

"No. There's a high chance this procedure will fail, since by its nature it cannot be tested beforehand. I saw no reason to get their hopes up when they could do nothing to help."

A hypodermic needle springs into existence in Ziggy's outstretched palm.

"Inject it into Venjix," says K. "Anywhere soft will do. The bicep, the neck -"

"Will it kill him?"

"There's a reason I stopped you from killing him just now. It wouldn't do any good. Venjix is a code, not a body. If this body fails, it will upload the code to a Cloud repository, which will immediately activate and begin the process of producing a new body for him to download himself into."

Ziggy's stomach drops. "So I just almost slit his throat for nothing."

"Not for nothing. I had been planning to attempt to use your damaged morpher to teleport in myself since I assumed at this point either you had been turned into a hybrid and compromised that way, or that your weak personality had simply fallen under Venjix's sway."

Ziggy snorts. If she only knew.

"That would have been incredibly dangerous for me. But when I saw you taking the opportunity to eliminate the threat, without even knowing I was watching, well. I was impressed. Give him the injection, Ranger. He'll only be down a few more minutes."

"Will it cure him? Will it bring Dillon back?"

K blinks at him a few times, and Ziggy realizes she's deciding whether or not to lie to him.

"No," she says. "My hope is that it will disable him permanently. It's another computer virus, meant to interfere with his programming. At the least, if my coding is up-to-date with his recent upgrades, it should eat up his processing power. And even if this body eventually dies, the corrupted code should download out with him, so he'll continue to be weakened no matter where his programming ends up being stored."

Disable him. What will that look like?

Whatever. It's better than killing him.

Ziggy gives him the injection in the right bicep.

"He hasn't upgraded in a while," says Ziggy dully. "He says the body can barely take a tiny fraction of his programming already. Not too surprising, with three people in there."

"Three?"

"Venjix, Dillon, and Jason - the guy who originally owned the body. You should look him up. Jason Dillahunty. Maybe his family's still alive."

"Three," K repeats. "Dillon wasn't the original personality?"

"No. He was a computer program. Like Venjix. That's all he was."

"And Venjix's full program isn't in the body? That's a problem. My virus is designed to - SERIES GREEN!" cries K.

Too late.

Dillon knocks Ziggy's lights out.

* * *

K had said the injection would "disable" Dillon. That's not quite how Ziggy would describe what happens.

Dillon's every bit as physically strong as he ever was - a bit slower, perhaps - but no longer in control of his emotions.

The attack bots he sends in are now thrown together hastily, in reactionary fits to some perceived insult from the Rangers. They're meaner, more dangerous, more explosive, and far easier to defeat.

Every defeat is taken out on Ziggy.

Dillon seems to know he's out of control. He restrains his temper as much and as long as he can, and Ziggy imagines it's because, at some level in there, Dillon doesn't want to kill him.

He almost does, though. Many times.

Sometimes it's just beatings, or a huge burst of rage-generated electricity that Dillon tosses his way in frustration. Twice, these last stop Ziggy's heart, and he wakes up on an emergency care table.

These are the good times, the minor fits. When he loses his temper outright, Dillon calms down quickly and leaves Ziggy alone for a short time afterwards.

If he manages to restrain himself, however, and let the anger simmer, his abuse is extended, creative, sadistic.

Once, he catches Ziggy cutting, and instead of forcing him to stop, he hands him a razor and forces him to keep going.

Once, after a violent sexual session - Ziggy knows it's rape, but won't let himself use the word, even in his own thoughts - Dillon, displeased with Ziggy's performance, locks Ziggy in a containment locker so small he can neither lie down nor sit up, and leaves him there without water until Ziggy's mouth bleeds as he begs for mercy.

The white streak in Ziggy's hair has begun to spread.

There's biting, there's pulling his hair out, there's tying him up. Ziggy wonders if, in his exploration of vice, Dillon has taken to watching pornography. Surely a robot couldn't come up with some of the sexual nonsense Dillon's putting him through.

And Ziggy begins to realize, with growing horror, that he might not be alone. Sometimes when Dillon corners him, there's already blood on his hands. Whose blood is it? Is Dillon killing animals? People? Are there other prisoners in here?

Or is it Ziggy's own blood, and he's so confused and abused and traumatized that he's somehow forgetting the horrors that happen to him one after another after another after another?

* * *

Another month has passed, and Ziggy is having the day after a very bad day.

He's lying on his bed because it's all he's capable of doing. He's received some medical care, but everything hurts.

Dillon seems aware that he went too far. After waking Ziggy from the anesthesia - something Ziggy is getting used to - Dillon quietly kissed him on the mouth a few times and looked into his eyes as if checking to make sure Ziggy was still in there. God knows what he saw. He ducked away quietly and hasn't bothered Ziggy for a few hours.

But now, behind him, Ziggy hears the stomp of robot feet on the metal floor.

Though it hurts, he turns over and finds a Grinder standing in the doorway, pointing a gun at him.

Ziggy has long ago lost any fear of the Grinders. They're part of the background of his life now. This is the first time since his very earliest days in the fortress that one has acknowledged his existence.

They're all controlled by Venjix. They wouldn't hurt Ziggy except on his orders. So Ziggy's not exactly afraid. But he knows something has changed. Has the battle come to the fortress? Is he going to be used as a hostage? Are the Grinders rebelling or something?

He waits. The Grinder doesn't move. Ziggy sits up, slow and pain-ridden as a ninety-year-old. The Grinder still doesn't move.

"Just so you know," Ziggy says. "At this point it's common courtesy to start making demands. Whenever you're ready. I'm listening. Don't have much I can give you. If you want a close-up magic show, boy, are you in for a...what do you have there?"

The Grinder has something tucked under its left arm, something big and awkward.

It's Ziggy's sketchbook.

"Have you been looking at that? Can't a guy have a little privacy?"

What possible use could the book be to a Grinder? Was it _looking_ at his sketches? Ziggy feels inordinately embarrassed. He knows his drawings lately have changed to reflect his mental state. Dillon has dismissively referred to the graphic, detailed nightmare pictures as _dramatic_, which indeed they are, but it's a bit worse than that. Ziggy would never willingly show them to an outsider.

Ziggy and the Grinder look at each other.

"Well, come on!" cries Ziggy. "Tell me what you-"

The Grinder fires.

Ziggy jumps, but all that comes out of the gun is blue light. It spreads over his body in a familiar honeycomb pattern and vanishes.

Where has he seen that pattern before? Where has he seen that gun before?

It's Dr. K's. It's a scanner from her lab.

A display on top of the gun glows - Ziggy can't tell what it says - and the Grinder lowers the gun, gently places the book on the ground…

And removes its head.

It's a human in a costume.

"Scott," whispers Ziggy.

Scott nods. There are tears in his eyes, but he smiles and pretends to be casual as he indicates the gun. "Sorry about that. Had to scan you for hardware. You're all clear, Ziggy."

There's a pause. Ziggy's body goes hot and cold - hot with excitement, joy at the sight of his friend, and cold at the thought that Scott has seen his most recent drawings. Nobody, not even a bright spirit like Scott, could miss their implications.

But Scott is smiling like it's all okay.

"Well? What are you waiting for? 'I'm Luke Skywalker, I'm here to rescue you?'"

"If I jump up to hug you," says Ziggy, "are you going to turn out to be a hologram?"

"Nope. It's me."

Another pause. Scott is looking at him eagerly.

"On second thought, why don't you come over here?" says Ziggy. "I'm really..." He chokes. "I'm _really_ happy to see you. But I'm not exactly… Your timing honestly leaves a little bit to be desired."

Scott's expression wavers, but he doesn't understand. He's going to make Ziggy say it.

Ziggy's voice breaks: "I can't walk."

Scott holsters the gun, closes the distance, and grabs him up in a huge hug.

Yeah, it hurts a little, but holy crap.

A set of friendly arms, strong and sure and absolutely non-threatening. A chest Ziggy can lean his head on without guilt or doubt. The protective presence of a brother, and of a leader and a hero.

It would probably have been the same with Flynn or Summer or Dr. K. Still, Ziggy is glad it's Scott. He's so straightforward. Absolutely trustworthy.

He's Dillon's opposite.

"You shouldn't have taken off the helmet," Ziggy says. "There are cameras everywhere, Dillon'll know you're-"

A distant explosion cuts him off.

"He's got bigger problems," says Scott. "The Zords'll keep him busy. Come on." Then he remembers. "I mean, I can carry you."

He shucks the Grinder costume, revealing his red series operator uniform underneath it. It's been so long since Ziggy saw bright colors, it almost burns his eyes.

"How hurt are you?" asks Scott, gingerly grabbing Ziggy under the knees and around his back. "Anything broken?"

"Yes. But I think this position's as good as any."

Scott lifts him, and Ziggy does all he can to hold in a hiss of pain.

"Where are the others?" he gasps.

"Fighting."

Scott carries him easily, quickly, through the maze of corridors and control rooms that have become Ziggy's world. They pass through his first mural room, then others that Ziggy has managed to deface with various kinds of graffiti. Ziggy sees it all through Scott's eyes. Some of it is sweet, sad, sentimental. Some of it is horrifying. Scott must have gotten a good look at all of it on the way in, but he's pointedly ignoring it now.

It occurs to Ziggy that Scott has always talked and dreamed about leading an offensive strike on Venjix, but now that the strike has arrived, Scott, instead of leading the charge, is sneaking around in disguise to rescue Ziggy. The extent of the sacrifice isn't lost on Ziggy. It does hollow him out a little, rather than plumping him up, though. He's not sure that what's left of him is worth all this trouble.

They've reached an exit, or at least they can see a spot of light where an outer wall has been breached. Scott's grip on Ziggy tightens, and Ziggy realizes Scott is uncertain.

"What's going on out there? Is this it? The big one?"

"No," says Scott. He has paused for no reason Ziggy can see, and he's looking around nervously. "We didn't have the machine power for a full-on game ender, but Dr. K was supposed to…"

Dillon's voice echoes around them: "Meet you on the way out?"

Scott whirls, materializing his helmet _just_ in time. A Rocket Blaster volley slams his face and neck, knocking him back while Ziggy clatters to the floor; more shots fly from both sides, but Ziggy is forced to curl up in fetal position, trying to control his breathing and wait out the worst of the pain for half a minute before he's able to look up and witness the small battle.

Dillon is morphed. He shouldn't be; his shift cell was destroyed by K shortly after he revealed himself as a Venjix plant, and anyway, the suits aren't supposed to be able to recharge without the help of K's computer. But obviously he's found a way.

That's not the worst of it.

He has Dr. K. She's caught in an iron one-handed headlock, stretched against him, her face pointed straight to the sky, eyes squeezed shut as she struggles to breathe: a human shield.

She's wearing a variant of the Series Operator Silver suit - she must have been able to recover it from the Grid after Gemma's death - but her head is exposed.

Scott's doing his best to free her, but close combat isn't an option.

"Thought you had me, didn't you?" asks Dillon, his voice distorted by the helmet. It's slurred, too, a result of K's virus. "Thought your counter-virus was so slick you could just waltz in here. I own this desert. I've known you were coming for ten hours. A terabytes of junk code aren't going to make up for a couple thousand Grinders and three attack bots. How do you think Flynn and Summer are doing out there without you, Truman? Is your dad flying one of those jets my cannons are shooting down?"

"Did you always talk this much?"

Scott, recovered, is dancing skillfully out of the line of Dillon's gun, leaping off the edges of the corridor while trying to keep himself occasionally between Dillon and Ziggy. Dillon's aim is off; he's working at half his normal speed.

And the fact that Dillon only fires when Ziggy is well out of range of the blasts is so obvious, Ziggy knows it can't be lost on Scott. Indeed, after a few back and forths, Scott settles directly in front of Ziggy, and the volley stops entirely. Something clatters onto Ziggy's lap. Perhaps Scott intended it to be a secret, but there isn't enough noise or space here for any of them to miss it.

It's Ziggy's morpher. Repaired.

He never liked it; it never felt quite right on his arm, and now, as he struggles to put it on again after a year, it feels more unnatural than ever. It's too big, and it spins ridiculously as Ziggy struggles to his feet and peers out from behind Scott.

The two pairs stare at each other: Dillon and Scott tall and braced, equally matched in appearance of strength at least, their respective hostages unable to move. Ziggy makes eye contact with K. He hurts for her, for her pain and fear, but he knows she's not in mortal danger just yet.

If Dillon's plan were to kill her, he'd have done it already. He could crush her skull with his fingers alone, even unmorphed.

The silence stretches.

"Well?" says Dillon.

"Well what?" asks Scott.

Ziggy knows.

Scott probably does, too, but he's playing dumb. More explosions can be heard outside - explosions that sound more like those produced by Zord cannon than anything else. Is it possible the Rangers are winning? Could Dillon be bluffing?

"I snap her neck," says Dillon, "And this war is over. We both know it. She's the only one who can make the suits or the Zords function. She designed half the tech in that dome. I can win right now, Scott."

"Ziggy," says Scott, "Morph."

"Yeah," says Dillon. "Go ahead, Zig. Morph. That'll make a huge fucking difference. I could never beat a big scary Power Ranger!"

"He doesn't have to beat you. Just teleport out."

"And K dies."

Scott sighs. "What do you _want_, Venjix?"

Dillon's helmet vanishes. He looks directly at Ziggy, making eye contact over Scott's shoulder. The corner of his mouth quirks. "He's just one kid. He's not worth losing this war over, Scott. And you can see I've kept him alive. Hand him over, I'll hand over your precious doctor, and we'll go back to our game. A deal, just like with the Fury. I kept my word then."

Scott, without looking, reaches back towards Ziggy. He grips Ziggy's bicep as if...what? Is he trying to comfort Ziggy or himself?

Dillon squeezes, crushing Dr. K's neck more tightly, and her silent struggles become frantic.

"If you lose her," Dillon says, "you'll lose him anyway. He's the whole reason you came out here, isn't he? Don't be an idiot."

Scott dematerializes his helmet too. He and Dillon are perhaps twenty feet apart, and they stare into each others' eyes, both visibly struggling to remain calm. Scott's right hand twitches a little when Dr. K lets out a rasping shriek as she tries to breathe, but he holds his ground. Ziggy, in agony, fiddles with his morpher, trying to think of a way out of this.

"What do you even want with him?" Scott finally says.

"Do you know," Dillon says, shifting his posture and letting K take a breath, "I recently asked Fresno Bob almost that exact question."

Ziggy's blood seems to freeze. He hasn't even thought of Bob's name in six months, but suddenly all the fear and shame it always evoked comes crawling back up inside him, starting in his gut and spreading outward towards his skin. As if in understanding, Scott squeezes his arm just a little.

"Fresno Bob?" says Scott. "You talked to him, huh? So it was you? It's been you this whole time?"

"It's been him that what?" Ziggy is surprised to find his throat still works, though it's scratchy.

"I asked Fresno Bob," Dillon continues smoothly, "What use he ever had for Ziggy Grover. Why he'd keep a sweet, stupid little bigmouthed fuckup around a criminal cartel for all those years. What was he good for?"

"Shut up," whispers Ziggy.

"Gotta tell you, Bob's answer didn't surprise me. About the same one I'd give you. He said: A people-pleasing little twink? Good with his hands? Big mouth? What do you _think_ I kept him around for?"

Ziggy wants to die. Scott's hand on his arm has turned to stone, to pinching metal.

Without looking back, Scott murmurs, "Fresno Bob is dead, Ziggy. Most of the cartel is. There have been murders, dozens of them. Remember that guy you had us look up? Jason Dillahunty?"

Duh, Ziggy remembers, but it's Dillon that answers.

"Yep, good ol' D-44. I picked him for a reason. He was in a psych ward when I found him, and they kept really good records. He was a serial killer. Charmed 'em with his looks, roped 'em in, and once he had them in his hands…"

He acts out a little strangulation on Dr. K.

Ziggy, who feels as if he's floating outside his own body and observing the scene from above, notices something strange: K and Dillon are nearly the same height. That...shouldn't be possible.

"He always felt bad about it afterwards, but just couldn't stop." Dillon flashes a shark-like grin. "Seems like it's rubbed off on me. I'd be happy to, you know, let you all live in the Dome a little longer. Pick you off one by one instead of the old-fashioned way? We can all go home, Scott. Just hand Ziggy over."

"So you can keep killing," says Scott. "But you don't just kill them, do you? What you did to those people… What kind of robot are you?"

Scott's stalling. Why is he stalling, with K in Dillon's arms, with the battle raging outside? What is he waiting for?

Ziggy figures it out.

"Get in gear," Ziggy whispers. "RPM Ranger Green."

The suit slams around him, nano-fiber armor topped with a bulletproof pylex helmet and eyeshield. Electricity hums through his aching muscles; he's suddenly able to stand straight.

"Zig," says Dillon, "If you teleport out of here, she dies."

Ziggy teleports.

But not _out of here_.

He teleports right in front of Dillon.

And materializes his axe.

Dillon rolls his eyes. "What is this, Zig? You going to hack my head off, with K in the way? You going to kill me now, fully-powered, with a hostage between us, the way you couldn't kill me when I was defenseless on the floor? You can't do it. You're too weak."

"Shut up," says Ziggy.

"Everybody here knows what you are - good for exactly one thing. Everything you have, I gave you, including your stupid fucking Power Friends, who would have let you die in jail if it weren't for me. You're obsessed with me. Can't live without me."

"It's Dillon I can't live without," says Ziggy. "And you're not him. He was nice to me."

"He _was me_. I paid attention to you. That's all you needed to latch on like a -"

"You're NOT HIM!" Ziggy thinks somehow yelling will make it true. "He never talked this much. And he'd never let Scott pull something like this."

"Like what?"

Ziggy swings the axe.

Dillon could have dodged the blow if he weren't disabled, and if it had come from any reasonable direction - at his head, at his sides, at his arms or legs - anywhere you'd swing if you were trying to avoid Dr. K.

But Ziggy swings center - right at Dillon's chest. And K's.

Because it's not Dr. K there, any more than it's Dillon.

Ziggy recognizes that too-long body, and he knows K's tricks.

His axe smashes through K's chest, which explodes into sparks and an anemone-like flurry of wires. It's Tenaya 15's body, with a new face attached. Doubtless, Dr. K is piloting it somewhere outside the fortress, somewhere thoroughly safe.

The axe-blade slices all the way through Tenaya's robot body and partway into Dillon's rib cage.

Dillon roars, Scott whoops, and there's a ton of blood, just so much, so, so much more than Ziggy expected. He had thought Dillon was like Tenaya now, all metal under a thin layer of human skin, but apparently he was mistaken. There are still organs, still a beating heart and purple, spongy lungs and endless streams of spurting veins and arteries, open to the air like fire hoses.

Scott finishes the job. It's quick: Several blasts to the exposed heart, and Dillon's struggles cease. Ziggy watches his eyes, which remain open: Click, click, click, the shutter in there flapping away, between personalities, trying to find one that can stay awake, stay alive, get out of this.

The shutter stops.

Dilon's clear brown eyes stare at him, accusing. _You could have saved me_.

Ziggy tears off his morpher. He falls to his knees, sobbing, and Scott is quick to catch him and hold him steady.

"You were great, Zig. Just incredible. I can't believe you figured that out. We were just using the Tenaya decoy to delay him so we could win the battle out there. He's probably not really dead, I mean, he must have just downloaded into a new body somewhere, but this is a big day. We'll take out half his tech while he's rebuilding himself. You did it, Zig. You're a hero. Oh, god." - as Ziggy's tears become hysterical, as he chokes and moans - "Ziggy, I'm so sorry. I know. I know what he meant to you."

He does know, doesn't he? They all knew, probably, all along. Ziggy had always thought they would hate him for it. But Scott's touching him and looking at him, and there's only sympathy in his face.

Scott ends up carrying Ziggy away from the body.

* * *

Ziggy has dreamed every day of coming home to his friends, and it's everything he wanted. The hugs (even K gives him a hug!), the comfortable bed, the real medical care, the total relief from physical pain. God, it's the first time in at least six months he hasn't been in pain. They put him on drugs for anxiety and depression, too. Probably too high a dose; he spends the first day in a fog, and the second two days in bed.

The team is wonderful. They baby Ziggy, taking care of him as he has literally never been taken care of before. They're solicitous of his well-being without asking too many questions; they anticipate his needs; they give him all the touch and affirmation he could ever wish for.

They also seem to know, more or less, what the situation between him and Dillon was. He can tell by their careful phrasings, by what they don't say, or how they start sentences and stop them. How do they know? Perhaps Scott told, or perhaps Ziggy's injuries made it obvious, or perhaps they just know him better than he ever dreamed and they're savvier about the world than he thought they were. They always seemed so innocent.

On the fourth day, Ziggy asks K what they've done with Dillon's body. She is cold and robotic and weird about her answer, and the Ziggy of last year would have been put off enough to let the question go.

The new, older, much-less-able-to-deal-with-bullshit Ziggy gets Scott to advocate for him. K spits out the answer without making eye contact.

Colonel Truman has forbidden them from bringing Dillon's body inside the dome. Even "dead," he's simply too dangerous. Nobody could forgive Truman for his naivete this time around if he brought the same Trojan horse back within the gates.

K has been studying the body, using the remains of the remotely piloted Tenaya 15 bot. Tenaya struggles to walk and only has functionality in one hand and eye, so she's not ideal, but she can read code in android bodies, and she has helped K learn a lot.

The brain is dead. The Venjix programming is gone, remotely uploaded to a new body which the Rangers will meet soon, and conveniently deleted lest it should be used against him later.

Nevertheless, the hardware remains, including the healing nanobots in the blood, and the body is not decomposing. It is repairing itself.

"What happens when he wakes up?" Ziggy asks.

"That assumes quite a bit, Series Green," says K.

"I want to be there when he wakes up."

"Out of the question."

"Will he stay brain dead? Who will be in there? Jason?"

"The brain was deprived of oxygen for at least twenty-four hours. I very much doubt any traces of Jason Dillahunty's memories or personality survived. The brain tissue will be entirely new. If the body wakes up, it may be as helpless and ignorant as a newborn infant."

_May_. _Might_.

She doesn't say it, and she thinks Ziggy's too stupid to think of it himself, but it's the first thing he thinks of.

Jason dead. Venjix gone, his code sent to the Cloud.

An empty brain. Empty of human consciousness, and of Venjix's personality programming. But what about non-Venjix programming?

Would Dillon's software have been remotely erased along with Venjix's? Surely not. Why would it?

When, on K's monitor, the body starts to twitch, Ziggy morphs, takes his Zord, and heads for the site. No one tries to stop him, though he can see on his screens that Scott is following at a respectful distance.

* * *

The body sits up, groaning, and brushes days of accumulated grit from its clothing - its leather jacket and jeans, since the Ranger suit powered down and dissolved twenty-four hours after brain death. The remains of Tenaya approach, eager to administer tests, and are quickly shoved aside.

The body blinks in the sunlight. It coughs. It shakes its head like a dog, spraying dirt from its hair. Then it turns and sees Ziggy. It freezes.

Ziggy is sitting twenty feet away, in the shade of his parked shark Zord, using the amputated trunk of a Grinder for a chair. His heart is pounding, but his head is clear. He hasn't taken any pills today.

The body stares at Ziggy. It breathes hard. It looks around, wincing, rubs its face, turns around, looking for an out.

It can travel in any direction. Ziggy can see that it's considering running, which is Dillon all over. There's desert everywhere. But there's really nowhere to go. Eventually it turns back towards Ziggy, squares its shoulders, and walks toward him - eyes fixed firmly on the ground.

It sits on a bit of rubble next to Ziggy. They're both facing the Dome of Corinth.

"So. Why'd you come back?" it says at last, and it's Dillon's voice, Dillon's cadence, Dillon's body language.

Ziggy waits for tears to well up inside him, but they don't come.

"To see if it was you. If you were back… buddy. Ol' buddy ol' pal." His goddamn voice cracks.

"Even if I am - and yes, it's me, by the way - but how could you ever believe it? I could just be lying again. What are you going to do? Take me back in there, have me back on the team?"

"Ah, no, I mean, I don't think even Summer would think that was a good idea. I could ask, if you wanted. I have some pull now. They're being nice to me."

"I remember everything, Ziggy."

Ziggy looks down at the body...at Dillon. It's okay to think of him as Dillon. It's okay.

Dillon continues. "It wasn't me, I swear to god, but I remember all of it like it was me. I remember what I… what he did to you."

"Mmm hmm, mmm hmm." Ziggy nods enthusiastically, hating himself for his awkwardness. He had imagined many versions of this conversation, but cannot summon any prepared words right now. "And?"

"_And?_"

"Well, how do you feel about that? Try to use 'I feel' statements, that's supposed to help generate non-confrontational-"

"_And why the fuck did you come back?_" The cry isn't angry. It's agonized. Dillon jumps to his feet, paces, and tries to face Ziggy. He fails. He's restraining tears. "What do you want, an apology? I'm sorry. I guess! It wasn't me, but I'm sorry. What, do you want to be friends? I can't even look at you! And I _don't_ mean that the way it sounds, and you know it, so don't start."

Dillon has paced in a tight circle three or four times now, and he plops down right where he started, next to Ziggy. He puts his head in his hands.

Ziggy knows Dillon probably needs time to process, so he restrains himself for five whole seconds before placing a hand on his shoulder. Dillon twitches, but doesn't fight him.

There: there are the tears. Ziggy's, not Dillon's. Dillon has swallowed his emotions and set his jaw. Ziggy collapses beside him and spiders himself around him in a huge hug, crying on his shoulder. He presses their foreheads together, carding his fingers through Dillon's still-silky hair.

Dillon doesn't discourage him, except with the low mutter, "You know Scott's surveilling us, right?"

Time passes. Neither of them quite knows what to do.

Ziggy wants to be kissed, but even if Dillon had officially, as himself, come out of the closet regarding Ziggy, which he hasn't, he's clearly in no mood of that kind at the moment. His emotional constipation is one hundred percent restored.

He's his old self.

"Can't stay here forever," Dillon says at last. "Venjix will have downloaded into something new. He's probably flying back as we speak."

"What will he do with you when he gets here?"

"Don't know. I didn't know I was a plant. I don't know anything about myself. I could turn on you again in a second."

"Do you want me to leave?"

Dillon grimaces. But: "Yeah. Only way you'll be safe."

Ziggy sniffles.

He rises, but he's still weak, and after a few steps, he stumbles.

Dillon catches him.

And again.

And a third time.

* * *

Ziggy is surprised how readily the team agrees to the arrangement. Oh, there's pushback, discussions, warnings, recommendations that he see a psychiatrist and so on, but ultimately, they let him go with Dillon when they could as easily have forced him to stay. He realizes it's possible that the team was nearly as upset about the loss of Dillon as he was, and as eager to have him back in any sense that was reasonably possible.

They can't let him back in Corinth, obviously. No sir, not for a minute, not for a second.

Instead, Ziggy and Dillon are taking the Fury and...not running. Corinth is all that's worth seeing in the world; there's nowhere to run. But they're going to patrol. Camp. Stay on the outside.

They'll communicate with the team from time to time. Supplies will be passed outside the dome, but nothing can come in. Dillon thinks if they make it to the site Gem and Gemma used to roam, it's possible he could dig up some of their old tech and tap into the Power Grid to restore them. It would go a long way toward repairing a great many wounds.

Ziggy is welcome back at any time, and Dillon vows he'll make him go back if he gets sick. Or becomes too annoying, or says the wrong thing. Dillon only managed to be ginger with Ziggy, and avoid making empty threats of this nature, for about two days.

His surliness has deepened, and it's easy to understand why. He can no longer trust himself at all.

Ziggy knows Dillon is terrified of snapping, blacking out and hurting him again. But he can't stay away. At least not while Ziggy's begging to remain by his side.

It's a long time, maybe a week, before Dillon puts a warm hand on Ziggy's knee during a quiet moment.

Days later, they brush sides while setting up camp, and Dillon lets it happen a couple more times.

Then there's a brotherly hug.

Then the same hug, and he lets his lips brush the top of Ziggy's head.

Then he lets Ziggy kiss him on the cheek.

Ziggy thinks it might be years, or never, before sex might be an option again. He knows Dillon struggles to believe Ziggy could still find that appealing. Altogether, he's probably a bit saner on the subject than Ziggy has ever been, and he's every bit as traumatized as Ziggy was by their time in the fortress.

He encourages Ziggy to draw instead, to get some of that energy out. He sees to it the team provides paper and pencils.

Ziggy draws Dillon over and over. Dillon bitches about it sometimes, and orders him to draw the landscape - the trees, the occasional flower, the rock formations, the Dome. Ziggy does. He's getting to be a real artist.

He talks more and more, the way he used to. Dillon sucks on lollipops the way he used to.

They're making progress towards bringing back Gem and Gemma.

And one night, when they've made camp but haven't yet gone to bed, and they're lying out under the stars beside a campfire, Ziggy worms up into Dillon's armpit, and Dillon lets him. He pulls a blanket over them both. They stay there all night, sharing body heat.

Ziggy, face smashed up in Dillon's side, asks how many more nights like this they'll have before Venjix is back. Dillon says not many.

His inhumanly strong arm, which never gets tired or uncomfortable, or loses circulation under the weight of Ziggy's head, tightens.

"It's okay," says Ziggy. "We'll fight him together. You and me."

"Yeah," says Dillon. He stares up at the night sky, eyes reflecting the Milky Way and the millions of stars. Without light pollution from cities, night out here is almost bright enough to read by.

"What are you staring at?" he asks Ziggy. "You gonna draw me again tomorrow?"

He's so beautiful with those stars in his eyes. "Yes! I am!"

"Okay."

Dillon brushes Ziggy's eyes shut. Ziggy listens to his heartbeat - loud and fast - through his leather jacket. Ziggy's own heartbeat is slow and sure. He knows what he's doing. He does.

He does.


End file.
